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JUN 9 1&# 




A YOUNG MAN'S 



DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE 





W.CFAUNCE, D. D. 




PHILADELPHIA 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

1420 Chestnut Street 




1st COPY, TWC COPIES RECEIVED- 
1898. ^ %0% 






Copyright 1898 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 



jfrom tbe Society's own press 



PKEFACE TO 
EKLAKQED AND BEVISED EDITION 



The repeated calls for a new edition of "A Young 
Man's Difficulties with His Bible " have induced the 
author to revise the work, bringing it, especially in 
Chapter V., fully up to date. Here and there sub- 
stantial additions have been made to the original text, 
and the book cannot but be more valuable than before. 
The author records with gratitude to God the very 
many instances in which he has heard that these lec- 
tures have been greatly useful. Some young men oc- 
cupying prominent places in foremost churches have 
been helped to hold fast to their faith. In some cases 
young men in college who had gone over to the ranks 
of an open infidelity have owned that, under God, 
this little book has changed all the ideas of their life 
by changing all their conceptions of the Bible. May 
God similarly bless the new edition. 

D. W. F. 

Pawtucket, E. I. 



PREFACE. 



The author, on assuming the pastoral charge of a 
church in a thrifty and intelligent inland city of New 
England, found in the community a large number of 
young men not exactly sceptical but a good deal unset- 
tled in their views of religion. They were graduates of 
Grammar and High schools ; intelligent young men who, 
though employed as clerks or apprentices, found time 
to read the papers, the magazines, and occasionally a 
book. They had caught the drift of one section of popu- 
lar thought. They asked for some book which should 
meet briefly and yet fairly the difficulties which they 
felt. There were plenty of scholarly volumes, suited to 
men who had received a liberal education and who were 
masters of their own time. But a small, popular and at 
the same time accurate volume, suited to this demand, 
the author could not find. It occurred to him to 
invite these young men to state to him frankly their 
perplexities, and then to give a course of lectures on the 
general subject of these " Difficulties." The lectures were 
given to crowded houses on Sunday evenings, one in each 
month, for two successive seasons. It has been thought 



6 PEEFACB. 

that good might be done by publishing selections from 
these lectures. A few of them have been taken, and 
the style somewhat changed from the spoken to the 
written form. The aim has been to give the results of 
careful study without the processes, to be as accurate in 
the statement of facts as if the work were to be used as 
a text-book, and yet to keep in mind the class of young 
men for whom it is designed. Every chapter, without 
an exception, has grown out of an actual conversation 
held with some young friend or else out of some letter 
or message received from him. When delivered as lec- 
tures the author received repeated thanks from individ- 
uals to whom they were helpful. Given originally to 
his former charge at Concord, N". H., a portion of the 
lectures have been repeated to the congregation which he 
now serves in Lynn, Mass. It is his prayer that God 
may make this little volume a blessing to those who 
read it. 

D. W. F. 
Lynn, Mass 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

FAOB 
THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK 9 



CHAPTER II. 

18 THE BIBLE TRUE ? 37 

CHAPTER III. 

IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 66 

CHAPTER IV. 

DIFFICULTIES AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS 95 

CHAPTER V. 

DIFFICULTIES AS TO GEOLOGY 123 

CHAPTER VI. 

DIFFICULTIES FROM ASTRONOMY 149 

CHAPTER VII. 

DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS 163 



A YOUNG MAN'S 

DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 



CHAPTER I. 
The Young Man's Book. 

It is told of a certain publisher that he was in despair 
because a rival firm had issued so many excellent and 
successful books of advice to the young. He confided 
his perplexity to a friend. That friend advised him to 
select the finest paper and the clearest type, and then to 
reprint that book of the Bible known as " The Proverbs 
of Solomon" under the new and startling title of 
" Counsels for Young Men by a King." "Whether the 
advice was followed, and whether if followed the venture 
was successful as a business speculation, is not known. 
But this is certain ; that if some would be disappointed 
at their first opening of such a volume, on furthei 
reading they would be compelled to admit that the old 
book was new, and that the new book was the freshest 
and richest of all the many volumes addressed to young 
men. 

Solomon had the advantage of knowing thoroughly 



10 A TOUKG MA^'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

of the tilings about which he wrote. The son of a king, 
inheriting wealth, with princely tastes, with a love for 
learning, and a natural shrewdness in dealing with men, 
with manners courtly, elegant in person, a close observer 
of all the things and all the men about him, he gathered 
up the wise sayings of the ages, and passing them 
through the mint of his own mind, he issued them, 
newly coined, for the moral and social and spiritual cur- 
rency of all the world. The Psalms of David his father 
were for closet use and for temple service on the Sabbath. 
The Proverbs of Solomon, the son, were for out of door 
life on all the week days of the year. David helps us 
sing and pray, but Solomon tells us how to live wisely 
when the prayer and the worship are ended. His pro- 
verbs are the condensed and portable wisdom of the ages. 
The versatility of the author is amazing. He* seems to 
nave listened to the prattling of childhood, and to the 
whispered accents of youthful lovers, to have put him- 
self into sympathy with the trader in his store and 
the wife in her home, with the priest at the temple altar 
and the beggar at the temple gate, to have heard the 
grumble of the disappointed man and the chuckle of the 
man who has just seized on worldly success, to have 
heard all the haughty tones of the prince and the lowly 
words of the peasant, to have stood by manhood in its 
developed strength and by age tottering under the load 
of buried hopes towards a willing grave ; and to each 
one of all these classes he interprets, better than the 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK 11 

man himself could do it, the peculiarity of his wants, 
and the needs of his life, and then he offers by way of 
practical commentary, some quick pithy sentence of 
sanctified wisdom. He fused the older proverbs of the 
world, extracted the dross and retained the gold. He 
took up the selfish shrewdness of mere worldly wisdom, 
and where the proverb was wrong he made it right, and 
where it needed the salt of religion he always added it, 
as a power to purify and save. One idea, that of god- 
liness, runs through the book. Wisdom is godliness ; 
and by godliness he means "the love of God," and " the 
fear of God," the sense of the " eyes of the Lord as in 
every place," and of God as one who " will bring every 
work into judgment whether it be good or whether it be 
evil." This intense godliness is the golden thread on 
which all these pearls of proverb are carefully strung. 

Nor was his Encyclopedia, for the book is really such 
in its character, the result alone of observation and learn- 
ing. The author had known the experience of life. 
Written near the close of a singularly varied and exten- 
sive career, in which he touched heights and depths sel- 
dom visited by one and the same human soul, with 
memories of the widest possible contrasts of physical 
mental and moral position, an outcast at one time a 
king at another, here heading a rebellion and there the 
most loyal of men, at one time fascinated by philosoph- 
ical speculations, next tossed to and fro by the dreariest 
scepticism as to God and the immortality of the soul, 



12 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

and again bedraggled in the mire of heathenism 
through the persuasions of his idolatrous friend, Hiram, 
king of Tyre, and then leaving his thin philosophy, 
coming out of his scepticism, and up from the slough of 
the lowest idolatry, we see him emerge upon the 
high ground of religion, humbled by his fall, penitent 
for his guilt, and resting, at length, as the result of the 
broadest experiences and as the climax of all his wisdom 
and knowledge, in the conclusion of the whole matter, 
that to fear God and keep his commandments is the 
whole duty of man. 

His fall was indeed a sad one. For only one who 
stands so high can fall so low. Another has said of him 
that i ' He sinned with a high hand on a large scale and 
with a certain royal gusto. He drank of the cup of 
corruption deep and large ; emptying it to the very 
dregs. His fall is instructive. The pinnacle overhangs 
the precipice. And any great proportion between gifts 
and graces renders the former fatal as is a knife in the 
hands of a suicide, or handwriting to a forger. His 
misery became something wonderful. And thus on all 
sides, bright or black, he was equally and soundly great. 
Like a pyramid, the shadow he cast in one direction was 
as great as the light he received in the other." In the 
Ecclesiastes we have his spiritual biography. "We go 
with him through the changes of his infidelity, of his 
sensualism, of his ambition, of his disappointment in 
them all, and we see him in his return to God. And 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 13 

then, revising all his former work, recasting his maxims 
in the crucible of his own, experience, and setting, in the 
purified wisdom of his later days, the seal of a divine 
inspiration upon them, he writes in his maturest years 
this book of " The Proverbs " which is addressed to the 
thoughtful and earnest men of the world. 

Such is the book which commends itself to the study 
of young men. On further, we are to take up the mat- 
ter of a young man's difficulties with his Bible. Objec- 
tions are to be considered. The gravest questions about 
the volume which is popularly called by those who know 
it best and love it most ' e the Word of God," are pre- 
sently to be discussed with what of fairness and candor 
we can bring to the consideration of them. But as every 
building must be in some way approached, as the archi- 
tect plans always a portico to his edifice, so we will 
enter upon our work, through this royal gateway of 
ancient wisdom, by our study of Solomon — the wise man 
of the olden time. 

Let us be sure that we get clearly before our minds the 
object of the author in this book, of " The Proverbs." 
There is indeed one general design running through all 
these books of the Bible. And yet under this general 
purpose, there are as many subdivisions as there are 
books. No two cover the same ground. For we have 
here a history and there a biography, in one book a 
direction as to what to believe, in another as to what to 
practice, now a collection of devotional psalms, and 



i4 A YOUtfG MAK'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

then an epistle to a church or a letter to a prominent 
man. But in each of these books there is a specific 
design to be accomplished. 

What then, is the aim of the author in the Proverbs ? 
A very brief examination of the book will convince us 
that its specific purpose is to show men their duty in 
practical life. It ferrets out men. It shows the eye of 
G-od's omniscience to be upon all the minutest thoughts 
and feelings and acts of our mortal existence. If other 
books concern themselves with the questions of our im- 
mortal life, this has to do chiefly with our present con- 
duct as citizens of God's world. If any man says the 
Bible talks as if we had nothing to do but to die, talks 
as if is our life were all to be passed in a monastery or a 
church," we say to him, here, at least, is a book which 
follows you to your business, goes into the shop, comes 
behind your counter, sees the weights as true or false, 
looks over your shoulder at the ledger, goes back to 
your family, has a home thrust at every part of youi 
daily life. There are no metaphysics here ; for all is 
intensely practical. 

If a young man with earnest heart comes to ask how 
he can gain the earlier inward experiences of religion, 
we would not point him to this book ; unless we knew 
that some outward wrong had kept him from right feel- 
ing. It is true that we find the elements of every 
truth in this book of Proverbs. But who would go intc a 
well that he might read by the starlight that penetrans 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 15 

to its depths, when he can have the full sunlight with- 
out that trouble ? To the gospels, to that especially 
of John, would we send him ; to the Acts of the 
Apostles he should go and see how inspired men answer 
the great question of the ages, " What must I do to be 
saved ? " 

But if a man is already a Christian and would know 
how on that foundation to build a noble structure ; if 
he would do the best with himself, and make the utmost 
out of life, we would point him to the Book of Proverbs. 

So, too, if there be any young man who has supposed 
that the ordinary social virtues are all the religion a man 
needs, and if he has an impression that the Book of 
Proverbs favors this idea, let him come and study these 
pages. He will find that no book is so at war with the 
idea of the merely ornamental virtues when not attached 
to a holy heart. God is in this Book of Proverbs. It 
insists in its opening chapters that sooner or later, in 
time or eternity, utter ruin will overtake the character 
that is not built upon "the fear and the love of God." 
Wisdom, moral wisdom, that which takes God's claims 
into account — is the basis of the morality it enjoins. 
This, the foundation stone, once laid, the book shows how 
every stone is to be hewn and every course to be placed 
as we build the edifice. And so all private life, and 
public life, all social, domestic, and political relations, 
all moralities and courtesies and charities are here sepa- 
rated and then combined and illustrated, their shape and 



16 A STOUNG mak's difficulties with his bible. 

color all given, and the whole commended and com- 
manded to the young men of all ages and climes. Or, 
it may be, that one has imbibed notions which he thinks 
more especially broad and free. He cares less for the 
right ordering of outward life, thinking it more a matter 
of custom, convenience or education. He has become 
interested in the speculations of the hour as to the origin 
of all these things about us, and as to the laws of this 
wondrous nature that is engaging the attention and awak- 
ening the keen interest of the thoughtful and intelli- 
gent young men of the day. He is becoming less stout 
in his assertion of what man can do, and more aware of 
the mighty forces of the world. He is smitten by the 
majesty of law. He comes to think of this force, com- 
pared with which man's power is so feeble, as imper- 
sonal. Solomon became at one period absorbed in the 
thought of the objects of the natural world, as a modern 
young man is in danger of becoming absorbed in the 
thought of its laws. As the one found himself drawn 
to be an idolator, so the other is drawn towards fatalism 
in the presence of the vast powers of the universe. But 
there comes a time when a man sees the tendency of 
things. He has to own an impersonal Nature, or else a 
personal Creator and Sovereign. Fatalism says It, exactly 
as religion says God. 

Each of these excludes the other. If there be a God 
who rules his universe, there is no room for the fatal- 
istic it. If there be, in the smallest event, anything 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 1? 

outside the divine control, then there is no more an in- 
finite God. Fatalism, a century ago, loved to talk of all 
things as coming by chance, as if everything were too 
loose for a God. To-day it would insist that everything 
is so fixed, so bound by law, that there is no place nor need 
for God in the working of events. They work them- 
selves out in definite ways. Buckle, with scholarly 
phrase, will have it that even moral actions are as fixed 
as physical events. And, in social life, a frivolous fatal- 
ism is constantly heard, saying, " It is all fixed, all 
fated. It happens so. It can't be helped. It is a thing 
of destiny. What is to be will be." 

Now how is this fatalism to be met ? By asserting 
the truth of man's free will ? But that is simply meet- 
ing the vastly lengthened line of fatalism at one point. 
It is opposing an avalanche, by the brandishing of a pin. 
Within certain limits man is free. Bat his circle is as 
that of a peck-measure to the orbit of the most distant 
planet. A thousand things touch every man, over which 
he has no control. His birth, in its time, place, manner, 
circumstances, and, usually, his death also, are not 
matters of his own will. First and last and midst and 
always through his life, he encounters powers and events 
that are beyond his control. There is then no sufficient 
answer to fatalism in the undoubted truth of man's free 
will. There is one and only one answer broad enough 
to meet all the facts. It is the answer of religion. 
Religion insists upon a God, all -wise, all- just, who, 

B 



18 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

through fixed law, and, if need be, over fixed law ; who, 
through man's freedom, and if need be, over that free- 
dom, can and does control all things according to the 
counsel and purpose of his own eternal intelligence and 
will. Strangely enough, some men always confound 
these two things — fatalism and. the divine election. 
But they are as far apart as the poles. They exclude 
each other. Both cannot be true. One of them must 
be. And the only reply to the fatalistic it, is that fur- 
nished by the being and rule of a personal God. 

Fatalism may be compared to a vast revolving iron 
wheel. It goes round remorselessly, pitilessly, crushing 
all before it. It can have neither intelligence nor pur- 
pose, neither justice nor compassion. It shrieks with 
every revolution, "It can't be helped. It must be en- 
dured. It is all fixed and fated. There is no purpose, 
no reason, no result. It is the only God. " Before these 
awful revolutions of this terrible and monstrous lawless 
law — for law without a God is really lawless — all the 
light and love and joy of the divine Paternity are crushed 
out, and man seems to be the mere mote imprisoned in 
the mountain. Oh, how widely different in all its power 
on human life, is that great solar fact that " the Lord 
God Omnipotent reigneth ! " 

There is an ante-war incident that shows the power 
for despair of the one, and for hope of the other view. 
A dark cloud hung over the interests of the African race 
in our land. There seemed no way of deliverance. 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 19 

Frederick Douglass, at a crowded meeting, depicted the 
terrible condition. Everything was against his people. 
One political party had gone down on its knees to 
slavery. The other proposed not to abolish it anywhere 
but only to restrict it. The Supreme Court had given 
judgment against black men as such. He drew a pic- 
ture of his race writhing under the lash of the overseer 
and trampled upon by brutal and lascivious men. As 
he went on with his despairing words, a great horror of 
darkness seemed to settle down upon the audience. 
The orator even uttered the cry for blood. There was 
no other relief. And then he showed that there was 
no relief even in that. Every thing, every influence, 
every event was gathering not for good but for evil 
about the doomed race. It seemed as if they were fated 
to destruction. Just at the instant when the cloud was 
most heavy over the audience, there slowly rose, in the 
front seat, an old black woman. Her name, " So- 
journer Truth." She had given it to herself. Far and 
wide, she was known as an African prophetess. Every 
eye was on her. The orator paused. Eeaching out 
towards him her long bony finger, as every eye followed 
her pointing, she cried out, "Frederick, is God dead? 93 
It was a lightning-flash upon that darkness. The cloud 
began to break, and faith and hope and patience re- 
turned with the idea of a personal and ever-living God. 
Such is always the result, whether we look out on the 
broad scenes of human history, or in upon the lowering 



20 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

events of any one "human life. Everywhere it is the 
word of despair, and God is the word of faith and 
hope. 

And as the divine plan of things is the true view of 
them, so there must be, unto the complete answer of all 
fatalism, an emphasis put upon the eternity of this 
divine plan of things. For are not all our thinkers 
pushing their inquiries backward ? Are they not asking 
whence and when this established order of things ? 
They go back before man to find his origin in some vast 
process of development. They push back their f atalis - 
tic it until they come virtually to make an eternal it. 
And the only answer possible is that furnished by the 
Scripture doctrine of an eternal God who from " before 
the foundation of the world hath chosen " the things 
that shall be. It is Solomon's doctrine that the recog- 
nition of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, and 
the sum of all knowledge. And Christian thinkers are 
being driven anew to assert this doctrine by the fatalistic 
tendency of certain lines of modern thought. As noth- 
ing less than the thought of an eternal and personal G-od 
meets the demands of the intellect, so nothing less than 
this meets the yearnings of the heart. How justly and 
beautifully has Faber said : 

" Majesty, unspeakable and dread ! 

Wert thou less mighty than thou art, 
Thou wert, Lord, too great for our belief, 

Too little for our heart. 



THE YOUNG MAST'S BOOK 21 

But greatness which, is infinite, makes room 

For all things in its lap to lie ; 
We should be crushed by a magnificence 

Short of infinity. 

Great God ! our lowliness takes heart to pla7 

Beneath the shadow of thy state ; 
The only comfort of our littleness 

Is that thou art so great." 

And when an inquiring young man is driven to this 
recognition of God, as a logical necessity of all thought, 
as a demand alike of brain and soul, of the outward 
nature that surrounds us and of the inward nature that 
is made to know and judge of these outward things and 
to trace back facts and laws to their only possible origin 
in the personal thought and personal act of a personal 
God, he has come to stand not only upon a broad and 
lofty ground, but beside all the best thinkers of the 
world. For some of those thinkers whose philosophic 
theories are often regarded as tending towards the 
denial of a personal God, make haste to deny the infer- 
ence. Herbert Spencer claims that the doctrine of the 
correlation of forces does not exclude that of God, and 
Tyndall hastens to correct the inferable Atheism of his 
Belfast address. 

And so the world's experience of philosophy and 
even of speculation leads a man back to the place where 
Solomon was brought — the place, beneath the fear, love 
and service of God, from which he never should have 



22 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

wandered, and which he entreats every young- man never 
to leave. 

Or, if one has been tempted to think it brave to 
doubt about God and the soul and immortality, this book 
will serve as a tonic for his faith. One book of Solomon, 
the Ecclesiastes, is the book of doubts ; or rather the 
book of doubts solved. In that book, Solomon recounts 
the old arguments used when he was a sceptic, when he 
was a pleasure seeker, when he was astray in idolatry. 
We see him, hear him at his worst ; and then, with him, 
go back to the " conclusion of the whole matter," in the 
devout recognition and the earnest service of God. But 
in the "Proverbs" there is a strong joyous faith which 
the writer not only possesses but commends to the young 
men of the world. The young man is addressed as capa- 
ble of faith. God made man to believe. The great 
difference between him and the higher animals is very 
largely in the fact that he has the capacity for faith ; 
the ability to believe upon testimony. The beast has no 
such power. The brutes can remember, can do many 
acts singularly like reasoning. But they cannot collect 
and compare evidence and believe and so act upon it. 
The men of fifty years ago collected various items of 
knowledge ; and the boy of to-day starts where they 
ended ; for he is able to believe. Not so the colts of to- 
day ; for their sires collected no testimony. There is 
neither capacity to believe nor amassed material on which 
to exercise faith. Something can be done by interbreed- 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 23 

ing to develop other powers. But no capacity for faith 
in testimony can be developed in the brute creation. 
Hence progress for them is impossible. They have no 
faculties adapted to faith in others' testimony. They 
are made to know what they can through eye and through 
ear, by touch and by taste. Man alone is capable of 
faith. He receives most of his knowledge by credence. 
He believes it on the testimony of others. Man, unlike 
the brutes, is by his nature a believing animal. When 
he has no faith in testimony he is no better than a 
brute. A man's great characteristic is power to believe 
— to believe the testimony of his fellow-man and the 
revelation of his God. 

Some young men are tempted to think that, since we 
have the power of doubting as well as the power of be- 
lieving, we are to work both by doubt and by belief. But 
we have the power of doubting just as we have the power 
of sinning. We sin by perverting our powers. They 
were given us not for sin but for service. So we have 
eyes for seeing, but we have power to put them out. 
Nevertheless God gave us eyes not that we might 
be blind with them, but see with them. Seeing is the 
legitimate use of the eyes, just as believing is the legiti- 
mate use of the faculties of the mind and soul. And 
what blindness is to eyes made for seeing, that doubt- 
ing is to a mind made for believing. When shutting the 
eye and closing the ear are the best ways of seeing and 
hearing, then doubting will be the best way of gaining 



24 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

knowledge about truth and duty. That young mas 
who supposes that if he is just a little sceptical, he shall 
be more likely to know what is truthful, makes a terrible 
mistake. The habit of doubting is the least reasonable 
of all habits. For a man was made to believe ; and he 
had better believe wrongly on some subjects, than to 
believe nothing on any. 

There can be no progress by doubt and negation 
except in error. But, says one, " Would you not have 
a man doubt an error, and is not such a doubt a help 
toward coming to the truth." We answer that if a man 
doubts an error because he is in the habit of doubting, 
he will doubt the truth for the same reason. We would 
have him see and believe the truth, and then whether 
he doubts or does anything else with the error, is of no 
consequence. Let any young man see that the believ- 
ing and not the doubting spirit is the guide to truth. 
For God made us and Jesus commands us to believe. 
So, too, if we are made to believe, there is something to 
be believed. God made the eyes to see something. If the 
feet are to stand, there is provided an earth to stand upon. 
If man is a believing animal there is somewhere truth 
to be believed. Truth must be a positive thing. It is 
of God. For God is the " God of truth." It is some- 
times said that the truth to any man is what he honestly 
believes it to be. "It is truth to him, though error to 
another." If that were so, truth would not be truth, 
but only each man's fancy. But God made the mind to 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 25 

believe, and the truth to be believed. When a young 
man says "I cannot decide among so many religions," 
he says either that God has not given him brains enough 
to believe, or else has withheld the truth, so that he 
cannot know it. If he says the first he denies his own 
manhood ; if he says the second he condemns his God 
for so making the mind and not making the truth which 
the mind was made to believe. 

In dealing with his doubts a young man should also 
be careful not to deem doubting the sign of a stronger 
intellect. It is far from that. Anybody can doubt. 
And a man who is floundering in a sea of doubts has no 
right to call out to others to come and see how brave 
and strong a swimmer he is. The strong and brave 
swimmer is he who gets through and gains the other 
shore, and stands firmly on the rock. He who can 
never quite make up his mind on any subject is not 
usually praised for vigor of intellect. The young man 
who begins a trade, a business, a profession, and then, 
speedily doubting his ability or taste for it, turns to 
another only again to doubt his ability, is a young man 
who awakens only pity for his want of perception or of 
purpose. He who cannot make up his mind on any 
public question, who always doubts how to vote, gets 
no praise for manliness. Doubt and indecision are marks 
of weakness rather than strength, and this book of the 
" Proverbs " breathes all through it a bracing atmosphere 
of faith m truth, in right, in manhood and in God. It 



26 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

shows on every page the native nobility of the man who 
is strong alike in the integrity of his outward virtue 
and his inward faith. 

The plan of the book of the Proverbs is in harmony 
with the design of its author. Its sayings are often used 
by us in disjointed fragments. For it is portable wisdom. 
But then any separate part is richer when seen in its 
connection with the scope of the entire book. It is not 
a chance medley of miscellaneous remarks. It is no 
mere scrap-book. It is far from being a confused mass 
of apothegm and epigram. The casual observer of the 
heavens on a winter's night might at first think the 
skies were full of bright disorder. To him it might seem 
as if God had scattered here and there the dust of stars 
carelessly over the firmament. But his friend bids him 
observe the lines of gigantic boundary, tells him of the 
order and place of each constellation and shows him that 
instead of chaos, there is plan in the skies. So it is 
with these proverbs. They seem like a whole firmament 
of gems. Such is their point and brilliancy that the very 
things that make them proverbs give them also their 
seeming abruptness and lack of connection. But the 
plan is there, and study will bring it out, until we 
admire the setting as much as the gems themselves. 

The first part of the book comprises nine chapters. 
In these the importance of a well grounded and firmly 
settled piety is insisted upon for every young man. 
The dangers and duties of early life are pointed out so 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 27 

clearly that this portion of the book has been called the 
" Young Man's Directory." The second part, compris- 
ing the next fourteen chapters, supposes that the clerk 
or apprentice or student has acquired his business, his 
trade or his profession, and is ready «o step forth into 
actual life. It tells him how to deal with men in such a 
way as to be prosperous and at the same time please the 
Lord. This second part may be called the " Merchant's 
Directory." The third division, though endorsed by 
Solomon, is the work of the son of a noble mother, who, 
with that mother in mind, sets forth the glories of true 
womanhood. It is the finest word painting in litera- 
ture ; and that too in a line where the poets of the 
world have woven their choicest garlands and sung their 
sweetest songs. But if these are the main divisions of 
the book, it comports well with its plan, that all through 
it, there should be delightful episodes ; the bowers of 
fancy where the poet may sing his verses, and the gar- 
dens where the philosopher may walk without inter- 
ruption while talking to the admiring disciples, who, 
after the manner of eastern scholars, love to call some 
veteran in wisdom by the name of master. 

In a gallery of art there are large and even colossal 
objects in one picture, while another is a miniature of 
not more than a hand's breadth. And here in this 
gallery are pictures with a solitary figure — a single pro- 
verb ; and there are also pictures of broadest artistic 
grouping. Here is a brief sentence, and there a long 



28 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

allegory. At one turn, we see the gilded coverings strip- 
ped from some sin, and at the next, the polished and 
barbed arrow goes home to the heart of a cherished wrong. 
And the whole is so condensed and pithy, so full and 
yet so keen, with outward duty mentioned and yet the 
right heart so insisted upon, piety blended with morality 
and morality so enforced by piety, that the book is 
always venerable but never stale, can always be consulted 
yet never exhausted. The oldest finds in it food for 
thought and the youngest a diversion and a delight. 
Those who enjoy the sketches of character and those 
equally who love to see a condensed argument in a single 
sentence, can find in this book the thing that suits their 
taste. Will that single proverb ever grow obsolete 
while men love their holy dead — the proverb that says, 
" The memory of the just is blessed ; " or will men ever 
cease to own the aptness of the saying " The heart 
knoweth its own bitterness and a stranger intermed- 
dleth not with its joys ? " And who has not been com- 
pelled to say as he has met the experiences of life, 
" Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of 
an enemy are deceitful ? " And how pertinent the sen- 
tence, " The beginning of strife is as the letting out 
of water ; therefore leave off contention before it is 
meddled with." What convert coming into the peace 
of God's forgiveness has not repeated those words, 
" Wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness and all hei 
paths are peace." Lord Bacon has been applauded for 



THE YOUNG MAK'S BOOK. 29 

his saying "Knowledge is power." But put the word 
wisdom for the word knowledge, and Solomon had said 
the same thing ages before. 

Observe also that many of these proverbs get their 
power from some picture in them. A comparison of a 
single word in the heart of a pithy sentence has made it 
easy to remember, and pertinent for quotation. " There 
is that scattereth and yet increaseth ; " " He that 
watereth shall be watered ; " "He that ruleth his spirit 
is better than he that taketh a city ; " ( ' The slothful 
man saith there is a lion without ; " "A word fitly 
spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." And 
if any man thinks these proverbs are mere truisms, let 
him pause over them and study them till they reveal 
themselves. He will find that there is a heart behind 
them. For they rise higher and strike deeper than the 
mere surface of our ordinary life. I never knew a man 
of sagacity, of practical skill in dealing with men, who 
was not fond of this Book of Proverbs. Such men have 
often these proverbs close at hand, an exhaustless 
treasure for daily use. 

The moral sketches that are scattered through the 
book are worthy of our study. They are exceedingly 
graphic. Perhaps there is no more terrible sketch in 
the Bible than that given in the opening chapter. A 
young man is warned not to go out into actual life with- 
out true piety. If he shall do it, all will go wrong. If 
he shall do it, God will be angry. God against him, 



30 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

calamities will sooner or later gather about him, ana 
destruction come like an armed man and there be none 
to deliver. "They shall call but I will not answer. 
They shall seek but not find." To the young man that 
laughs at religion and mocks at pity, who goes the voy- 
age without the chart that God has given, he saith, " I 
will laugh at your calamity and I will mock when your 
fear cometh ; when distress and anguish come upon 
you." And the reason for all this is given, in these 
words, " because they did not choose the fear of the Lord." 
So that in the opening chapters we have the key note 
of the whole book, and no where is there any declining 
from this grand and lofty tone with which the book 
begins, viz : that the fear and love, the trust and the 
joy of the Lord are the essential things in a true and 
noble life. The high and beautiful severities of moral- 
ity and religion stand forth, the glorious mountain 
summits that are never to be lost sight of in all our climb- 
ing. The air grows purer, the vision broader. The 
very precipices of doom are for a salutary warning that 
we venture not too near the shelving edge of any evil, 
lest we provoke God to leave us. And thus alike by 
warning and by wooing, by words that startle and those 
that encourage, by the fear of God and by the love 
of God, we are instructed, admonished, profited. The 
ruin of the godless man is made in this opening chapter 
a minister of salvation to all who propose to " walk 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 31 

not in the way of the wicked and refrain the foot 
from their path." 

Another of these character-sketches is peculiar to 
eastern life as seen to-day among the unaltered customs 
of the Orient. There, enervated by the climate, by lack 
of general enterprise, by the ease with which the few 
necessities of life are gained, men will doze away a life- 
time in an idleness that has no prosperity to excuse it. 
The idle man in the East is not a retired rich man, but 
often one who has need of daily labor. And Solomon's 
picture of the idler is drawn so sharply that we can 
almost see him in his sloth. There he is, prone on his 
bed, though the sun has risen, and others are at work. 
His fields are grown over with weeds. "Yet a little 
more sleep," he says drowsily when one would rouse him, 
— " Yet a little more sleep, and a little more slumber, and 
a little more folding of the hands to sleep" — and he 
has gone again. Eoused once more, he turns lazily on 
his bed and says, "There is a lion without in the way ; 
yet a little more sleep." Do we need to study this pic- 
ture ? If we had lived in the former ages before indus- 
try had become a passion of the nations, some exhorta- 
tion towards worldly thrift might have been needful for 
lis. But industry is the New England virtue, and a lazy 
man is the contempt of the community. And yet this 
outward thrift is often unattended with any inward 
aspiration. "To get on in the world" becomes the 
great aim. The intellect is often un tilled, and the soul 



32 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

is a luxuriant wilderness of weeds, the chance growth of 
accident on a soil that needs to be reclaimed and re- 
deemed for God. Idlers on one field we despise. Then 
must there be care lest, looking on the picture which 
Solomon has placed before us, we should fail to see his 
two-fold meaning; fail also to see that we may have 
escaped from the one to be ensnared in the other and 
the sadder peril. 

And the drunkard is also sketched by our royal 
artist. The twenty-third of Proverbs has been called 
the " drunkard's looking-glass." " Look not upon the 
wine when it is red ; when it giveth his color in the 
cup ; when it moveth itself aright." Do you see the 
man in the picture as he balances daintily the cup, as he 
looks lovingly upon it, lifts it carefully, then drains it off 
deliberately with the gusto of the finished drinker. He 
does not look within. He does not see the bottom of 
the cup. But Solomon — and he had seen it in a sad 
experience — will allow us to look through his eyes. And 
now looking closely at the picture, you will see that 
Solomon has painted a serpent in the cup. How plain 
it is. It is visible to every one except to the drinker 
himself. And as he drinks "it bite th like a serpent 
and stingeth like an adder." The deadly wine begins 
to circulate. Through every part of the system it is 
borne. And now comes the result. " Who hath woe ? 
Who hath sorrow ? " " Who hath contentions," — is ever 
quarrelsome? "Who hath babbling?" — that word 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 33 

"babbling," is the Yery word ; for the silly besotted man 
has now become a creature to whom blasphemy is wit 
and nonsense wisdom. " Who hath wounds without 
cause ?" — received of course in some low drunken brawl. 
" Who hath redness of eyes ?" " Those that tarry hng 
at the tvine." It seems then that a man may become 
wretchedly, boisterously, filthily drunk, though he may 
only drink wine." He continues, — " Thine eyes shall 
behold strange women." Strong drink feeds the flames 
of a raging lust. " Thine heart shall utter perverse 
things. Yea ; thou shalt be as one that lieth down in 
the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of 
a mast." Is not that an exact description of the stag- 
gering gait of a drunkard ? " They have stricken me, 
thou shalt say, and I was not sick ; they have beaten 
me, and I felt it not." The poor inebriate has been 
kicked and bruised by the men who induced him to 
drink, and he did not know it at the time. And when 
he comes to understand it, instead of resolving never 
again to touch the maddening draught, he cries out, 
" When shall I awake ? I will seek it yet again." 

Such is Solomon's picture. And, if I could get every 
young man who reads this volume to look fairly upon 
that picture in its faithful lines and its terrible colors, 
and then could show him that there was the remotest 
possible danger of such a fall for himself ; or that some 
friend might thus fall ; or that there is one solitary 
man on earth who might come down into this misery ; 



34 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

and if, on the other hand, I could show him that by 
total abstinence he could certainly preserve himself, could 
prevent his friend, could hinder even an enemy from 
this result, I should have an argument of no small force 
to press upon him for signing at once the most stringent 
of pledges to avoid all that intoxicates. 

And surely there never was a more strict pledge than 
this of Solomon. " Look not" he says. "We think it 
enough to say, drink not. But he knew the force of 
the temptation. The color, the sparkle, the very sight 
may awake the demon of appetite that is never allayed. 
"Look not on the wine." 

There is also, in these Proverbs a picture of true and 
uoble womanhood. And it stands right over against a 
vivid portraiture of her whose house goes down to death. 
In the latter sketch, the wiles, the tempting words, the 
whole process of allurement are described ; and then the 
folly, the wretchedness, the miserable and accursed end 
of him " Who goeth after her straitway as an ox goeth 
to the slaughter." " Her house is the way to hell going 
down to the chambers of death." But the other por- 
trait, how beautiful — beautiful in itself and beautiful in 
contrast. It is the portrait of a noble woman — the 
picture of a mother by her son. " The heart of her 
husband doth safely trust her so that he shall have no 
need of spoil." "She worketh with her hands." The 
writer had no idea of a human doll too dainty for labor 
and fit only for show. " She riseth and giveth meat to 



THE YOUNG MAN'S BOOK. 35 

her household." She is domestic, and yet while domestic 
when there is need for it, she is skilful in trade. " She 
considereth and buyeth a field." She is industrious — 
for it is said, "her hands hold the distaff." She is 
charitable. "She stretcheth out her hands to the 
poor." But mind and heart are not neglected. " She 
openeth her mouth with wisdom." " Her children rise 
up and call her blessed." She has helped and not hin- 
dered her husband's prosperity ; for it is said " Her hus- 
band is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the 
elders of the land." 

I would have a young man believe in God with a 
practical daily faith. I would have him believe in good 
men, and keep company with them. But next to this, 
I would have him believe in a pure, noble womanhood. 
There are doubtless base women. There are frivolous 
creatures, who live with no plan but to see and to be 
seen. And such women a young man should avoid as 
he would the plague. But there are those whom God 
sends for a man's help and guidance. He who believes 
in noble womanhood can find it. He who sneers at 
woman's virtue only proves himself to be base. A true 
man shows the nobility of his nature by his high ideal of 
womanhood ; and in turn they who are to meet that 
ideal have need to be careful of purity, honor, intelli- 
gence and religion. 

Enough has been said to show the general spirit and 
tone of this book of the Proverbs. Its peculiarity above 



36 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

any other one book of the Bible, is in the fact that it 
is directly addressed to young men. And this sketch 
of its contents is placed here at the beginning of the 
discussion as a sort of a portico, royal in its origin, 
attractive in its form, through which we may enter the 
temple of revelation, and mark certain mysteries, cer- 
tain wonders, even certain difficulties that have per- 
plexed many a young man and kept him from joining 
in the worship. 

It may be too, that going through this open door 
we shall discern more clearly the general plan of the 
Bible, and see how that in adopting each of all the 
forms that Hebrew literature took upon itself, we are 
specially privileged with that variety of literary method 
which enables us to behold truth in its many-sided at- 
tractiveness. Proverb and psalm, history and song, 
law and prophecy, are, all seized upon and built into 
the wonderful edifice. The book is thus the " Young 
Man's Book," not only as addressed in many parts of 
it to young men, but as opening before them a life-long 
study ; so that they can be sure of a line of thought 
and a theme of interest that will never clog. Age will 
not wither these inquiries ; for man shall never out- 
grow these questionings and answerings that are at 
once stimulated and gratified in this book. 



CHAPTER II. 
Is the Bible true ? 

"You believe in the Bible, I presume," said a man 
to bis fellow passenger in the railway car. " Certainly, 
I do," was the instant reply. "I presume you believe 
in it because of your mother's teaching," said the first 
man, in a sneering tone. " Precisely so," was the an- 
swer, " I do believe in the Bible for that among other 
good reasons." "I don't see," was the reply, "how 
that can be a good reason. Suppose your mother had 
been born a Hottentot, you would then have believed in 
idolatry, or, if she had been an Indian woman, you 
would have had faith in Juggernaut." "I probably 
should," replied the other. "I am surprised to hear 
you own it. Nine-tenths of the people who believe in 
the Bible have no better reason for their faith than just 
this ; their fathers taught it to them, and their mothers 
made them say their prayers, and so they believe in reli- 
gion. I am independent. I don't mean to believe any 
thing because somebody else does so." " Stop," said 
the other, " Stop right there and hear me a moment. 
I was taught the Bible by my mother, by her life as well 
as her lips. The Bible made my mother the best, the 



sweetest, the noblest woman I ever knew. It was her 
strength in life; her comfort in sickness, her all in 
death. I saw what it did for her, and I started with 
every presumption in its favor. I have other, and per- 
haps to you, they would be stronger, reasons for believ- 
ing in my Bible. But let me tell you that for myself 
the strongest of all reasons is that my mother, and she was 
such a mother, taught me its truths. I had a Christian 
home. I have travelled some ; and I know that there is 
not a Christian home on the continent of Africa ; there 
is not one in Asia, aside from what this religion of 
the Bible has done within a few years just past. In the 
hut of a Hottentot, or in the tent of a Bedouin Arab, 
I should have been taught in another religion, exactly as 
I should have been taught in another kind of astronomy, 
and natural philosophy and geology. What then ? Shall 
I think less of the true system of astronomy because I 
was educated to believe it in Christian New England, or 
doubt the facts of natural history because Agassiz 
taught them to me in America ? Shall I believe less 
firmly the facts of science because I learned them 
under circumstances most advantageous, in places where 
they could best be learned, and from the best of 
teachers ? And as for you, sir," turning to the other, 
" let me say just this ; either you had or did not have 
an early Christian home. If you had a pious father and 
a praying mother, and were taught the Biblical truths, 
and now have turned away from the Holy Book, you are, 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 39 

I am certain, far less of a man morally for it. For you 
have not the sanctions of that book when you do right ; 
nor its warnings when tempted to do wrong. You are 
not so pure, so strong in principle. Right and wrong, 
good and evil are not words with so much meaning as 
they would have had if you had read your Bible and 
striven to shape your life by its directions. Or, if you 
had no Christian home, if your parents were not devout 
people, then you started in life under a terrible disad- 
vantage, a disadvantage to your moral nature as great as 
it would have been to your physical nature if you had 
been born without feet or without hands. And instead 
of you reproaching me for my mother's religion, I am 
the one who should pity you for the terrible calamity 
under which you commenced life — the calamity of not 
having a Christian home." "Yes," continued the 
young man, "I do believe in the Bible, in part at least, 
because my mother did. And it is dearer because it 
was her Bible, and my God is more reverenced because 
he was my mother's God, and Christ is loved because he 
was my mother's Saviour, and heaven is more precious 
because the heaven of the Bible is my mother's heaven." 

And the sceptic was silent. What was there for him 
to say ? 

Many a young man educated to believe the Bible is 
entirely satisfied for himself. He knows that the book, 
which, universally obeyed, would bring universal joy — 
for that is its result as far as its precepts are followed — 



40 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

mast be God's book. His Bible is true. And yet, he is 
disturbed sometimes by the objections brought against 
it. He wishes to be more familiar with the outward 
evidences of the integrity of the Bible, that he may 
answer the sneers of opposers, and also that he may feel 
sure, on other and independent grounds, of the truth- 
fulness of the Scriptures. And there are some young 
men about whom, early in life, were thrown hosts of 
difficulties and perplexities ; and these were accompanied 
with sneers and innuendoes against Christians. Such 
young men have no appreciation of the moral agument 
from the elevation of a Christian home, nor can they 
understand the moral power of those benign influences 
which make up the moral atmosphere into which the 
more favored young men of this country were born. So 
that the argument to be presented in this chapter, hav- 
ing these two classes of young men in mind, must needs 
be both historical and moral. 

We will ask two questions. One of them is this : 
"Is the Bible true?" The other, immediately following 
it in logical order, shall be : "Is the Bible inspired?" 

In asking whether the Bible be true, the question is 
of the same kind as that raised when we inquire whether 
Macaulay's or Motley's or Bancroft's histories are true. 
It is an inquiry whether the persons who wrote these 
books of the Bible were eye-witness of the facts, or, if 
not, whether they had access to documents which they 
used so fairly that we can trust them as we do other 



IS THE BIBLE TBUE ? 41 

historians. When they state facts in their narrative, we 
propose to ask first as we do about any other writers of 
history, Are they credible men? Are they men whose 
character, opportunities for knowledge, whose presumed 
motives and whose conduct in life warrant our confi- 
dence ? Finding them reliable historians, men who state 
actual historic facts, it is indeed possible that we shall 
be compelled to go further. It may be that if true, they 
are true about such things, and in such a way true, that 
we shall be obliged to go on and to own their inspiration. 
But the inquiries before us now are with reference to 
their truthfulness, their integrity, their credibility. 

We cannot here take up in order the vast number 
of facts they state, and examine them in detail. That 
would be to write a commentary on the Bible. Nor can 
we quote at length the testimony of travellers in the 
lands of the Bible, nor recite the evidence accumulating 
every year from Assyrian, Babylonian, Judean and Egyp- 
tian tombs and monuments — that vast mass of corrobora- 
tion of many of the more important statements which 
are given in the scriptures. This is a field of unspeak- 
able richness and of unfailing interest. No one can 
spend an hour with such a book as Eawlinson's " His- 
torical Illustrations of the Old Testament " without 
wonder at the new evidence, reserved for the investiga- 
tions of the present generation, of the minute accuracy 
of many portions of our historical scriptures. To enter 
on this field is impossible for us in this volume. Nor is it 



42 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible, 

needed. For the strictly historical argument is really 
very simple; is narrowed down to the establishment of a 
very few facts which any man of ordinary judgment can 
easily understand, and about which he can easily make 
up his mind. The whole inquiry concerns the New Tes- 
tament. And of the New Testament we need only to 
consider the integrity of the four Gospels. For if these 
biographers of Jesus are to be trusted, our Lord indorsed 
the Old Testament and promised subsequent books of 
the New Testament similar to those which we have now 
in the Epistles and the Eevelation. So that the whole 
inquiry for us is just this ; have we reason to believe, 
that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have given us a fair 
and correct account of what Jesus Christ said and did ? 
To this inquiry the whole matter comes at length ; and 
on this thing depends the historic argument. 

Nobody doubts the existence of just these sacred 
books which we call the Old Testament in the days of 
Jesus. He quoted that volume, citing those very facts 
to which most objection is made, viz. : the fall, the 
flood, the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the 
manna, the lifted serpent and the story of Jonah. 
Sometimes he quotes the volume itself ; sometimes he 
gives the name of the special book from which he 
quotes. To a people venerating their sacred writings 
to the verge of bibliolatry he said " search the Scrip- 
tures," and he continually was saying that certain things 
were done, " that the Scriptures might be fulfilled." 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 43 

So that the whole question of the integrity of the Old 
Testament, though abundantly capable of defence on 
independent grounds, for us, in our present argument, 
may be said to be involved in that of the truthfulness of 
the New Testament. And as the Gospels indorse the 
Old Testament, so they also carry with them the integ- 
rity of the Acts, the Epistles and the Revelation. As- 
sured that we have a fair record of what Jesus did and 
said, we find among his undoubted discourses direct 
promises of a superhuman guidance, not only in bring- 
ing to mind what he had said to his disciples, but in 
guiding them into all truth ; even that which he could 
not tell them while he was in the body. He had more 
truth to reveal when the Holy Spirit should be given 
and they were to be shown the things to come. And 
assuming that these Gospels accurately report him, 
where shall we find the fulfillment of his promise except 
in these later New Testament books ? These later 
writers make the claim, and they are the only serious 
claimants to-day. If Jesus spoke truly in the promise 
as recorded in the Gospels, then these other New Testa- 
ment books are the fulfillment of his words. 

The whole matter comes down to very narrow limits. 
A thousand incidental questions may be raised which 
have only an incidental bearing. The decision as to 
three vital questions will decide the whole case. They 
are these. First : did books substantially like our four 
Gospels exist in the earliest Christian centuries r 



44 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

Second: did the authors of them enjoy opportunities for 
knowing what they affirmed ; and were they such per- 
sons that we can trust them to tell us the truth ? And 
Third: have these four histories of Christ been pre- 
served with as reasonable a degree of integrity, and have 
they been as fairly transmitted to us as have the works 
of other ancient historians ? 

As to the first of these inquiries, viz : the early ex- 
istence of the books, little need be said ; for the unani- 
mous verdict of scholars is well known. 1 Volney and 
his school, in an unfortunate hour, ventured to utter 
doubts as to whether Jesus and his apostles had ever 
lived. It was instantly shown that heathen and Jewish, 
as well as Christian historians testified to the existence 
and influence of him and his religion. And in the face 
of the fact that Christ's religion, as recorded in these 
books, had named an era in human history, this class of 
sceptics saw that they had blundered. And no de- 
cently informed man repeats these absurdities to-day. 
Kosseau, himself belonging to another school of seep 
ticism, published an answer to Volney, in which he in- 
sists, that if Jesus did not live, those who invented such 
a character as that given in the four Gospels, putting 

1 Those who desire a full discussion of this matter can find it 
in the elaborate work of Teschendorf, " When were our Gospels 
Written." See also Westcott's, "Introduction to Gospels." In 
these lectures, I have endeavored to give the results reached in 
the present state of Biblical scholarship, without entering at all 
r nto the processes by which those results have been gained. 
This is true both of this and the following chapter. 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 45 

such words into the lips of an imaginary being — have 
performed, in so doing, a greater miracle than any that 
they ascribed to Jesus. To-day the assent is uniform as 
to the existence of these biographies in the earliest 
Christian centuries — a fact allowed by Strauss and 
Ren an. No matter, here and now, for the way in which 
these two distinguished authors account for the fact. 
No matter for any theory, once attracting some notice 
and now vanishing, of myth as mingled with historic 
truth. No matter, so far as the present part of our 
inquiry is concerned as to whether the books contain 
only a mere substratum of truth ; no matter if any one 
should have the hardihood to venture again the absurd- 
ity of Yolney that the very basis was false. The argu- 
ment now is about the early existence of these books, 1 
the Gospels. And here there is an absolute unanimity ; 
all admitting that such documents, the basis of appeal 
for both friends and foes as to the alleged facts, did 
exist in the earliest Christian centuries. 2 

1 " The strictest historical investigations bring- this compila- 
tion — even by the admission of Strauss himself — within thirty or 
forty years of the time when the alleged wonders they relate are 
said to have occurred." — Henry Rogers in " Reason and Faith." 

2 On this point see the exhaustive treatment of Westcott in 
" Introduction to the Study of the Gospels." He shows that the 
" Oral Gospel," was the first Gospel — the story of the facts as told 
by word of mouth ; the apostles repeating the facts. And he 
shows why t was so for years in Palestine ; and how, at length, 
oat of this, came the Four Written Gospels ; the apostles com- 
mitting their facts to writing when in the course of nature they 
must leave their work — a work in which they could have no 



46 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

These four histories of Jesus Christ began to be read 
in churches as they became known ; John's Gospel be- 
ing thus indorsed and employed last, because last writ- 
ten, and because one early sect deemed the teaching of 
John's Gospel to be in opposition to their peculiar' views. 1 
But these objections were soon removed, and the Chris- 
successors. Jesus himself wrote no line. Not that he was un- 
able so to do ; for his knowledge of M letters," i.e., languages, 
amazed some of his hearers. He knew the Aramaic, his native 
speech ; he quoted the Hebrew ; he used Latin words, again and 
again, with the precision as to derivation which marks the 
scholar ; he quoted from the Greek language the very words of 
the Septuagint. In adopting the oral method rather than the 
written, he did exactly what other teachers of his age were wont 
to do. And so far from an objection, it is a confirmation of Chris- 
tianity, that it represents our Lord as adopting at the outset the 
usual oral method. 

1 For an account of this sect, the Alogi, see Westcott's "Intro 
duction, etc." ; in which there is shown the reason why this heret- 
ical sect hesitated for a time to acknowledge this Gospel as in- 
spired. But the point here made in my argument is not the in- 
spiration but the existence of the book. And as to its genuineness 
as history, it is perhaps a stronger proof of the carefulness of the 
early churches, that while there was the least doubt, they hesitated 
But doubt for the reason given by the Alogi — that it condemned 
their doctrine — is a doubt which is an evidence of the integrity 
as well as the existence of the Fourth Gospel. Not one solitary 
fact was ever alleged against the genuineness of the book, save 
this that I have named. The hint which was thus furnished 
1700 years ago has been taken up and used by unbelievers within 
the last fifty years. And the decision of 1700 years ago is now 
reaffirmed. Ewald, the great German critic, who has devoted 
immense labor to the matter, sums up the whole discussion as 
follows : " Every argument, from every quarter to which we can 
look, every trace and record combine to render any serious doubt 
upon the question absolutely impossible." 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 47 

tians of the early Christian centuries received the books 
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John as the authentic docu- 
ments of the new religion. 

The second inquiry is as to the authorship of these 
books. All accounts represent the authors of them as 
once residents of Palestine. All accounts represent 
them as plain men ; in part Galilean fishermen ; with 
one only of them, Luke, the physician, a man of pro- 
fessional education. The writers were plainly not 
scribes of the law; they were not ecclesiastically edu- 
cated men. But it is equally sure that they were not 
untutored peasants. They show a peculiar but an un- 
trained ability. They see things clearly, and have the 
mastery of a style of description that in its simplicity 
is at a world-wide remove from that of the elaborate 
historians of the age. They had just keenness and cul- 
ture enough to make the very best class of witnesses to a 
question of fact, and to enable them to state that fact 
in honest, unadorned, but accurate language. That 
they were men of either the ability or training required 
to originate such a character as that of Jesus Christ, is 
too absurd for any man's belief I What ! Galilean 
fishermen describing such a character, putting him into 
the most trying positions, in which he never once failed, 
placing words in his mouth that have led the wisdom of 
the ages, — they giving us the only ideal of perfect man- 
hood that is found in all the literature of the world — 
and doing this out of their own brain — mere novelists 



18 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

depicting an imaginary hero ! To believe this is a far 
greater demand upon our faith than to believe any or 
all the miracles that are found in the Bible. Our Lord 
must have lived, and these men must have been with 
him in the intimacies of social life as well as in his public 
teachings. They must have been witness of his mira- 
cles and so his historians 1 . An actual life, and the his- 
torians of that life his friends, intimates, disciples — 
these two things are demanded by the whole scope and 
the entire detail of the books themselves. Nor is there 
another claimant to the authorship of them. It is 
they, or the authors of books that would have made 
a world-wide reputation for any body, are unknown. 
The verdict of the world is given in favor of Mat- 
thew, Mark, Luke and John as the writers of the re- 
spective books which are everywhere known under their 
names. 

As to the theory once defended, but now entirely 
abandoned, that they were impostors, it is enough to re- 
mark that the ordinary motives to imposition are wanting, 
and that it is not possible to imagine motives for such a 
kind of deception, much less that these men could have 
done it, and then could have succeeded in foisting their 
imposition upon the keenest age — the Augustan age — 

1 Mark's Gospel is an exception only in appearance. For, (1,) 
the internal evidence that it is the work of an eye witness is 
stronger in Mark than in any other Gospel. And (2,) the Gospel is 
Peter's Gospel as to facts, while it is Mark's as to arrangement 
and verbal authorship. 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 49 

which the world has ever seen. Impostors could not if 
they would and would not if they could invent such a 
character as that of Christ. 

The theory of imposture surrendered, is that of self- 
deception any more plausible ? Enthusiasts with fancies 
for facts would have fared ill in publishing their pre- 
tended histories to a keen generation in which not a 
single false or even exaggerated statement could have 
passed unquestioned. Names, dates, places, references to 
streets and to persons, to public facts and private details, 
are scattered through these Gospels with lavish hand. 
And with such means of detecting the error furnished 
to them in the very documents themselves, it is certain 
that the skilful opponents of Christianity would have 
seized upon any alleged fact, and have proved it false, 
if that could have been done ; and in this way they 
would have inflicted such a serious blow upon the new 
religion as to have crushed it at the outset. For in no 
way could they have so destroyed the force of the new 
faith as by showing an error in its authentic documents on 
a question of public fact. Had such error been detected 
it would have been at once published to the world ; and, 
once published, the work containing it would not have 
been allowed to perish. But no such work exists. Keen 
opponents there were, who, if Jews, ascribed the Gospel 
facts to Satan, and if Gentiles, ascribed them to magic; 
in either case owning the facts ; and always quoting the 
facts from these accepted narratives of the Evangelists. 

D 



50 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

And as to the theory that these Gospels might have 
been written and placed in their present form partly by 
good men and partly by bad men — a theory just now 
most popular with objectors, and a theory the most 
desperate and the least plausible of any — it is enough to 
say that what might have been is not a proper matter of 
historic inquiry. No absurdity can be greater than to 
imagine the doings of this singular conclave where pious 
saints and impious knaves have met for the purpose of 
foisting Christianity on the world, — one party supply- 
ing a miracle and the other furnishing the teaching to 
match it, and the two woven together so firmly in one 
narrative that, like the seamless robe of Jesus, no men 
may part it. Or, if the good men and the bad men are 
supposed to have worked separately, what more incredi- 
ble than that bad men should retouch the draft of good 
men, and their patch-work of evil be undiscernible from 
the original fabric, unless it is the still more incredible 
supposition that good men should consent to retouch 
the draft of evil men, knowing it to be the evil work of 
such men, and yet indorsing it ! Strange good men, 
those ! 

The third point of vital importance is as to whether 
there has been a fair transmission to us of these Four 
Gospels. They were at once earnestly sought and highly 
prized by the friends of the new religion. The doctrines 
founded upon these facts which they state were made 
instantly matters of controversy. Every one can see 



IS THE BIBLE TBUE ? 51 

that it would be impossible to interpolate a new miracle 
or new sermon into these Gospels to-day. And for the 
same reason it would have been impossible fifty years 
after the books were written. Enemies were alert, and 
friends were already divided in their views of doctrine 
and duty. To have added any thing of importance, 
any new fact, favoring any particular school of belief, 
would not have been allowed any more than it would be 
to-day. In the second and third centuries, amid the 
divergence of beliefs, it was wished by some of the sects 
to obtain if possible the attestation of the apostles to the 
new doctrines and practices. But mark one univer- 
sally conceded fact. The heretics, not daring to tam- 
per with the recognized documents, invented others, 
new GosfjelSj to some of which the more bold ventured 
to affix the names of the apostles. But to all the Chris- 
tian world by the close of the second century the fraud 
was as apparent as it is to us to-day. A few persons 
were deceived for a time. But the imposture is as evident 
as would be the interpolation of a sentence of Jefferson 
Davis' speech on secession into the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation of Abraham Lincoln. In a subsequent discus- 
sion this matter will be named again. It is mentioned 
here only to show that the very existence of such 
fraudulent books, is a positive proof that the accepted 
documents could not be then altered by the insertion of 
any new miracle or doctrine. 1 They could no more have 
1 Westcott, in his " Introduction, etc." has shown that in the 



52 A YOU.NG man's difficulties with his bible. 

been purposely corrupted or changed then, than they 
can be to-day. Of course no miracle is claimed for the 
preservation of the Scriptures. In printing the Bible 
even with our splendid facilities there occur typographi- 
cal errors. Indeed it has been claimed that no volume 
of the size of the Bible has ever been printed without 
some mistake. But these errors do not harm the sub- 
stance of a volume. The most of these are of about the 
same importance as the omission to dot an i or cross a t 
on the written page. They are never alleged as against 
the integrity of an author's work. Changes in languages, 
differences caused by thousands of various readings as in 
other ancient works, have had their influence upon the 
text of the New Testament. But these things injure 
the integrity of the books just as little as they do the 
works of Caesar and Sallustand Virgil and Demosthenes. 
These verbal variations are merely curious questions of 
nice scholarship, and do not affect any one of the 
great Christian facts. 1 

The Gospel writers are unimpeached. The records 
are fairly preserved. For the jealousy of friends as well 

second century the whole New Testament, as now we have it, 
Epistles, and Acts and Revelation — the Gospels of course much 
earlier — was accepted with the same reverence with which Chris- 
tians regard the Scriptures to-day. 

1 * By all the omissions and all the additions contained in all 
the manuscripts no fact is rendered obscure or doubtful." — Pres. 
Hopkins. " By none of these variations etc., shall one be able to 
extinguish the light of a chapter or disguise Christianity but 
that every feature of it will be the Ba.me."«—Bentley. 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 53 

as the hostility of foes has combined to preserve these 
documents from any considerable error. They are 
trustworthy histories of actual events. And these true, 
as has been shown before, they carry with them the 
truth of the Old Testament which they indorse and the 
remaining portions of the New Testament which they 
promise. 

It would be of interest to note how the Gospels once 
ascertained to be true and so the other parts of the scrip- 
tures also true, that they in turn yield their evidence to 
these four Gospels. Given the books that go before, given 
also those that follow, and somewhere there must be 
such books as these gospels ; and it is these or none that 
can fill the conditions of the question. The Hebrew 
ritual obliges us to find somewhere the New Testament 
Christ. And the Acts are impossible apart from the 
christian facts which they indorse aud out of which they 
grew. And Paul takes up every main fact, not by any 
special purpose, but incidentally, in his epistles, so that 
he has been called our fifth Gospel. 1 But all this is in- 
cidental proof, nor need it be entered upon. 

The vital points of the historic argument have been 
presented, and the proof given that we have in the works 
of Matthew, Mark and Luke and John, trustworthy 
histories, and that in a fair degree of purity these books 
have come down to our own times. And it is clear that, 

i See this idea developed in an article " Paul as an Argument 
for Christianity " in " Baptist Quarterly," October, 1873. 



54: A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

these points proven, we may turn a deaf ear to a hundred 
minor questions, even if they have difficulty in them. 
For these questions are of side issues, and they bear only 
remotely on the subject. The opponents of Christianity 
have skillfully raised many a discussion on these side 
issues ; and the friends of a historic religion have allowed 
themselves to be seduced from the main question to en- 
gage in controversy on points not vital to the main ar- 
gument. Says Isaac Taylor, " The subjects of debate in 
the Christian Argument have come to us in inverted order. 
The logical order is this : Are the principal facts on the 
reality of which every thing rests, real or not ? If they 
are true, the conclusion carries with it all we need. If 
they are untrue, then a laborious discussion concerning 
such things will barely repay the few who abound in 
leisure and learning." 

In a very simple way elsewhere we ascertain a ques- 
tion of common fact ; as for instance, of the sailing of a 
ship from Liverpool to New York. There are a thou- 
sand incidental questions that can be asked about that 
ship, all of them of interest, some of them highly im- 
portant for other purposes, but none of them having the 
least bearing on the inquiry " did the ship actually make 
the alleged voyage from Liverpool to New York." 
Questions might be raised about her hull as wood or 
iron ; about her cordage and cable as wire or rope ; 
about her capacity as so many or not so many tons ; 
about her engines as American or English ; about her 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 55 

cargo and of what proportion was dry goods and what 
hardware ; of her officers and her ciew as capable or in- 
efficient, and of her voyage as smooth or rough. And it 
is possible to conceive of men as exercising their ingenu- 
ity so sharply on these things about that ship, and rais- 
ing thereby such a multitude of difficulties, that some 
would be inclined to express a doubt as to whether there 
was such a ship and such a voyage. And this is exactly 
what has been done about the Bible. Opponents have 
seized upon minor matters and pressed them. They 
have drawn off public attention from the very few vital 
facts, against which, once established, all objections are 
useless. They have discussed questions as to sails and 
hull and course and cargo. Meanwhile there are just 
a few facts which can easily be settled, as to the voyage 
of the ship, and which decide fully the whole matter. 
They are these three : Did she sail ? And the record 
on the books of the Custom-House at Liverpool settles 
that inquiry. Did she arrive in New York ? And the 
record on the books at New York is the evidence. Is 
the record correctly transcribed and faithfully for- 
warded ? And this third inquiry can be easily made, 
and an exact answer be given. And this closes the evi- 
dence. Precisely so in the case before us. The three 
questions we have discussed as to the Four Gospels, 
cover all that is essential. Nor should any young man 
allow himself to be confused by inquiries not vital to 
the historic argument for the integrity of these books. 



56 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

The argument stands unimpeached. And the religion 
of the Bible is able to make the high claim, that it is a 
religion of facts, and a religion that presents these facts 
as proof that it is from God. 

2. To the moral argument we now turn. The gen- 
eral influence of the Bible on men is a fact that one 
cannot overlook. The question is not whether any per- 
fectly obey it. But whether any are made better by it ; 
whether its tone is healthful. Does it elevate society to 
have the Bible circulate in the homes of a community, 
to have the Sabbath it enjoins devoutly kept, to have the 
religion of the Bible studied and practiced in some fair 
degree ? I need not ask these questions of any young 
man. They scarcely admit of being stated; for the 
whole thing is almost self-evident. There is not a piece 
of property that is not worth more, nor an industry that 
does not thrive the better, for the practice, however par- 
tial and imperfect, of the precepts of the religion of the 
Bible. The church building increases the value of the 
property in the town ; and purely as a means of general 
thrift, of public virtue and moral education, in more 
than one New England community, men of sceptical 
views have given liberally towards the erection of the 
sanctuary and the support of the Sabbath School. It is 
true that some have insisted upon charging the wars 
and persecutions unfortunately too common in human 
history to the influence of the Bible. But this is to 
confound its pure teachings with man's perversions, mis- 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 5? 

takes and hypocrisies. As reasonably might an argu- 
ment be constructed against all government on the 
ground that men had wrested it from its purpose and 
used it as an instrument of tyranny. If every crime 
has been at some time perpetrated under the name of 
religion or of government, we are not to attribute that 
fact to any thing that belongs to pure religion or good 
government. Surely we are able to make the distinc- 
tion between the Christianity of the Bible and man's 
corruption of it in human history. And the good in- 
fluence of Christianity — good in exact proportion to its 
purity — is seen everywhere. It is the strength of law. 
It gives purity to public sentiment. It favors learning. 
It extends the domain and strengthens the motives of 
all sweetest and most blessed charities. It gives sacred- 
ness to social life. Everywhere it is the friend of truth- 
fulness, of honesty, of purity, of every noble virtue. 
Could bad men have given the world such a volume as 
the Bible, even if they would ; or would they if they 
could ? 

It is moreover a singular fact that those who know 
this booh best love it ?nost. They are best qualified to 
judge of it. The devoutest students of it are just those 
most thoroughly persuaded of the divine origin of the 
book. True, some persons of intellectual eminence have 
rejected Christianity. But in nearly every case, they 
have not known intimately the New Testament. For 
it by no means follows that because one is eminent as a 



58 



naturalist, or as a mathematician, or as a historian, or 
as a literary critic, he is therefore a Biblical scholar. A 
mathematician and not a poet is the best judge of a 
question in the calculus. Indeed the poet's opinion 
may be worthless. And so on these questions of the in- 
tegrity of the Bible, an array of great names is some- 
times quoted on the side of unbelief. The eminence of 
these men in their own department, so far from qualify- 
ing them for authorities in such Biblical questions, is 
often the very thing that renders their opinions on this 
matter almost valueless. Hume's historical inquiries 
were confined to a certain secular line. Huxley's natu- 
ralistic studies are not of the slightest value in questions 
of religion. Large attention elsewhere, hinders neces- 
sarily large attention here. Hume gave himself 
to history and philosophy. His works would stand 
substantially as now if he had never seen a New Testa- 
ment. For his arguments are directed against all reli- 
gions, and indeed against all actual knowledge of every 
kind. He aimed to sever the relation of cause and 
effect. He needed no acquaintance with the New Tes- 
tament to construct a metaphysical argument which 
strikes a blow equally at all religion and all science. 
Voltaire's name has been quoted among those whose 
scholarship has been arrayed against revelation. But 
he had no scholarship at all on this matter. He made 
blunders that would have disgraced a Sunday-school boy 
of a dozen years, in quoting Biblical incidents. He gave 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 59 

his life to other books, and did not know the Book he 
denied. And Gibbon at 22 years of age or thereabouts 
says, "Here I suspended my religious inquiries." And 
he confesses to an idle life before this time. Surely 
such a man, however eminent in other lines, has no 
weight at all as against the sentiment " they who know 
the Bible best love it most." There are men of majes- 
tic intellect, and of calm, careful, profound scholarship, 
men who have made this book their study for years — 
men like Newton and Pascal and Leibnitz and Edwards 
and Chalmers ; and these are the men competent to 
testify in the domains of scholarship. Nor scholars 
only. There are tens of thousands of honest, careful, 
sound-minded men in every walk of life who have just 
lived mentally and morally on this book. They have 
thought of it on the week day and studied it on the 
Sabbath. They hnow the Booh. If an imposture, they 
would be the first to discover it. If it did them harm 
to practice the directions of the book, they would long 
ago have renounced and denounced it. They are 
honest, trustworthy men, if there are any such on earth. 
And they say that they read it with more and more 
interest and admiration and love with every year of 
their life. Such evidence is not to be set aside. 

There is also a wide difference between the morality 
taught by the writers of the Scriptures and that ex- 
pressly taught by the leading sceptics of the century 
now ending. Some of these writers of the Bible were 



60 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

certainly men all of whose acts no one defends. And 
here is the thing to be noticed ; they do not defend them- 
selves. t In wrong doing they do not go with bnt against 
their own teaching. They condemn their own mistakes 
and confess their own sins. We had not known those 
sins, but for their honest confession and condemnation. 
Their precepts and the vast preponderance of their per- 
sonal conduct are certainly on the side of virtue. But 
what of the teaching of men like Herbert, who declared 
that lust and passion were no more blame-worthy than 
hunger or thirst ; like Hobbs who maintained that right 
and wrong are but mere quibbles of imagination ; like 
Bolingbroke who insisted that the chief end of man 
was to gratify his passions ; like Hume who declared 
that humility is a vice rather than a virtue, and that 
adultery elevates human character. Paine was in his 
last days a drunkard, and Voltaire was found by his 
friends to be so often a liar that his word was worthless. 
Let a company of men believing these teachings 
organize themselves into a society for putting them into 
actual practice in any community, and that commu- 
nity would be compelled to rise and expel the foul 
plague from their borders. In short, let a company of 
men undertake to obey such teachings exactly as a 
church is organized to obey the teachings of Christ, 
and let them do it as far as Christians obey the precepts 
of the Bible, and who could or would endure it ? And 
while the Biblical precepts perfectly obeyed would bring 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE ? 61 

almost the old Eden days to our sorrowful earth, these 
precepts of sceptical writers perfectly obeyed would 
make a very pandemonium of wretchedness and abom- 
ination. 

The moral argument for the Bible plants itself upon 
the substantial agreement of its different parts, Kevela- 
tion is progressive. There is a progress of development 
from first to last. And truth is given in forms more 
crude in the earlier and more finished and comprehen- 
sive in the later books of the Bible. Hence here and 
there those merely verbal and temporary discords which 
serve, as musicians say, to heighten the whole effect. 
Those who would make capital of these things playing 
off a partially revealed truth of the Old Testament as 
in some sense antagonistic to the full-orbed truth of the 
New Testament, only show their lack of appreciating 
the breadth of God's plan in his Holy Word. And as to 
the slight discrepancies of the Evangelists, it is enough 
to say that they are just such and so many as a lawyer 
likes to have among the witnesses on the side of his client. 
For they prove that there Was no collusion, no agree- 
ment to support a fraud. These little discrepancies are 
exactly in those things necessarily omitted in the mere 
sketches and fragmentary notices of Jesus Christ which 
these writers profess to give us. As between any two of 
them, often a single word supplied incidentally by the 
third gives us the missing link that was needed to make 
the story coherent. And some difficulties remain on 



62 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

the face of the narratives when we would make a perfect 
harmony of the order of the events, which doubtless 
one word would solve — a word that, needless then, would 
be helpful now. It was indeed no part of the work of 
either to indorse the others. When they do it, it is not 
of design. Each had his own work to do, and did it. 
Had they been careful of their own harmony, mutually 
indorsing each other, their evidence would have been 
terribly weakened. But their carelessness in that matter, 
their " abandon," to their work, by which they go each 
straight to his own mark, without one thought that 
Peter's facts may cross Matthew's, or John's narrative in- 
jure Luke's story — their perfect unconsciousness of any 
suspicion — these are among the evidences of their divine 
commission. And the agreement not only in the facts, 
but what is far more important, in those great ideas 
that run through the Bible as to God, as to immor- 
tality, as to the way of salvation, as to a judgment, 
as to future awards — the agreement as to the ideal of 
Jesus Christ shown by the four writers of our Gospels, 
shown also by the writer of the Acts, shown also by 
Paul, by Peter, by John in their Epistles — this is the 
highest and best possible agreement, an agreement 
deeper than that of mere words. We see the blended 
rays of the same great solar truth, whether beheld in 
the promise of its dawning, in its onward march up the 
sky, or in the full glory of its midday completeness. 
There is a powerful moral argument in the idea of 



IS THE BIBLE TKUE ? 63 

Jesus Christ which the Scriptures present. Befer- 
ence has been already made (See page 61) to the fact 
that the writers of the four Gospels are in substantial 
accord, as between each other, in their portraiture of the 
character of Jesus Christ. But here the argument is 
drawn from the ideal itself. Whence came the thought 
of such a person ? If he is a fiction, existing only on 
these pages, somebody originated the fiction. And who- 
ever that person or that company of persons, it is cer- 
tain that the creation of such a character was too great 
an achievement for the party or parties to remain un- 
known. But where are the claimants of this greatest of 
honors ? Who originated the idea ? Even Eousseau, 
himself in some respects a sceptic, was struck with the 
moral majesty of the conception. He writes as follows : 

"Is it possible that a book at once so simple and 
sublime should be the work of man ? Is it possible that 
the sacred person whose history it contains could be a 
mere man. What purity, what sweetness ! what sub- 
limity in his maxims ! What profound wisdom in his 
discourses ! What truth in his replies ! Shall we sup- 
pose the evangelic history a mere fiction. It bears not 
the marks of fiction. The history of Socrates, which no- 
body presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of 
Jesus Christ : the marks of truth are so striking that 
the inventor would be a more astonishing character than 
the hero." 

Again I ask the question whence this idea of Christ ; 



64 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH SIS BIBLE. 

Did a knot of plebeians in Galilee, the most despised 
portion of a far-off Roman province, themselves un- 
skilled in the grand conceptions of Grecian or Persian 
or Arabian poets and philosophers — did they invent 
Christ ? Setting aside, now and here, the absolute im- 
possibility that they should have perfectly depicted him 
— depicted him with just enough of diversity to give 
unity to our impression of him, where did they get the 
ideal perfect man. There is one, and only one explan- 
ation. Jesus must have lived. His disciples saw him, 
listened to him, reported him. The Roman hero was 
no such character. An educated Roman would have 
made Jesus say, Blessed are the brave, the heroic and 
the noble. A brutal Roman would have said, Blessed 
are they that can strike back ; the men of nerve and 
muscle for the combat. But Jesus said, " Blessed are 
the meek." A Grecian would have made him say, 
Blessed are they who, wrapped in the contemplation of 
divine philosophy, forget the common herd of men, above 
whom they stand. But Jesus said, " Blessed are the poor 
in spirit." The Pharisee would have had him say, 
Blessed are the exact and careful in the ritual law. The 
Sadducee would have had him say, Blessed are they who 
care for this life, as the real life, and leave the future, 
if there be a future, to care for itself. The Essene 
would have had him declare, Blessed are they that con- 
quer the body with stripes well laid on for righteousness' 
sake. But Jesus, turning from every form of Jewish 



IS THE BIBLE TRUE? 65 

ideal, said, " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." Hillel, the first Eabbi of the age of Christ, 
would have said, Blessed are the educated in the Levit- 
ical law; " for no common person is pious." 1 But 
Jesus said, " Come unto me all ye who labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'-' How is it that 
here we have a character absolutely perfect ! Whence 
came the idea of Jesus ? There is only one possible an- 
swer. And that answer owns that the one great miracle 
that of Christianity, its sun to which all other miracles 
are but the stars, is the character of Jesus Christ I 

1 His very words. And yet the Jews to avoid the force of the 
powerful argument in support of Christianity of the cTiaracter of 
Christ, have intimated that some of his sayings might have come 
from their Rabbi Hillel ; a hint not lost on Renan in the French 
novel which he has called " The Life of Jesus." 



E 



CHAPTER IIL 
Is the Bible Inspired ? 

Pilate's question " What is truth," has been called 
the question of the ages. For we are made up in such a 
way as to believe in truth. And no matter how many 
wrong answers have been given, the fact remains that 
men will believe that truth is real, and that the truth 
can le known. This is so, of course, only about what 
can be proven. And we have seen how careful is the 
Bible to appeal to evidence. Christianity is a question 
of fact. It offers proof of its truthfulness in miracle, in 
prophecy, in peculiar teaching, in the person of Jesus 
Christ. 

But every young man opening the pages of his Bible 
can see that, true at all, the book is peculiarly, grandly 
true — a kingly book among men's books. The tone of 
it is unlike anything else in all the literature of the 
world. It asserts. It speaks with authority. It does 
indeed give proofs. But it does it easily, incidentally ; 
never with labor, as if men were hesitating and so it 
must hesitate ; never as if doubting somewhat its right 
to the most direct and positive speech ; never as if its 
absolute authority could be questioned. It is a book 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 67 

that, allowed to have any claim, must be allowed all it 
claims. True at all, it is true in such a way, and about 
such things, that there is not nor can there be any other 
such volume on earth. Nor is this claimed for the 
Bible simply on the ground of its literary character. It 
has indeed poetry that is sublime, history that is dra- 
matic in its form and careful in its fact, and narrative 
that is unequalled in simplicity and dignity. These are 
the indubitable marks of human genius. It needs no 
proof that some of these writers — the claim is not made 
for all — were men of exalted ability. They have made a 
book that is without a peer. It stands up alone, apart, 
peculiar in its claims, giving evidences of its truthfulness, 
and compelling homage for the genius that irradiates its 



And now comes the further inquiry as to this Book, 
the truthfulness of which we have already ascertained, 
whether besides human genius, there is also divine guid- 
ance ; whether God had any thing to do with this book 
in a sense in which he has not had with any other ; 
whether the book has not only the human inspiration 
of exalted genius, but also the superhuman inspiration, 
not of angel or of seraph, but of God's Holy Spirit. 
And the inquiry is whether, obliged to admit as much 
as we have already seen with reference to the book, we 
are not compelled to go on, and to admit that the book 
is divinely inspired. 

Let us ask what is meant by the inspiration of the 



G8 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

Scriptures ; next consider some of the objections to thi3 
claim ; and then let us attend to any direct proof that 
this humau book is really a divine inspiration. 

We are sometimes asked to define inspiration. Let 
it then be at once conceded that it is easier to describe 
than to define what we mean by that word. Even as to 
those sudden intuitions, discoveries, disclosures, those 
revelations of the mind to itself as to the way in which 
a given thing can best be done, that surprising in- 
sight which in some gifted moments enables us to see 
what was dark before, that quick flash of sunlight on 
the perplexity that had baffled our study for days and 
weeks, that unravelling and clearing of a tangled skein 
of things, that glad heart-throb when an idea is born, a 
thought struck out, an invention perfected — even as to 
these inspirations of human genius, it is not easy to 
offer any careful and exact definition. The great in- 
ventors and discoverers and poets and painters and 
orators cannot tell you what it is they feel. They can 
only give us some very general account of the state of 
mind in which they are when seized upon with the idea 
which they have given to the world. They say it must 
be felt in order to be understood. 1 But we have no man 

1 Mozart describing the state of mind in which musical com- 
position was to him most lively and successful says ; " Then, the 
thoughts come streaming in upon me most fluently, whence or 
how is more than I can tell. Then follows the clang of the dif- 
ferent instruments ; then if not disturbed, the thing grows greater, 
broader, clearer. I see the whole like a beautiful picture. This 
is delight." 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 6£ 

living to-day who is under a divine inspiration ; the in- 
spiration not only of one's own genius, but of a divine 
guidance for the communication of new moral truth to 
the race. We have no man who has the peculiar con- 
sciousness of speaking "the words, not which man's 
wisdom teacheth but which the Holy G-host teacheth." 
And only incidentally did those who once were thus in- 
spired tell us of the state ; nor do they inform us how 
they knew when they were and when they were not 
under the influence of this inspiring Spirit. Evidently 
it was not their ordinary and normal state as Christians. 
For they often distinguish between the sanctifying and 
the inspiring influence. But if they do not define they 
describe ; and if they do not tell us specially of the 
state itself, they tell us of the results of that inspiration 
in the production of the volume which we call the 
Bible. 

As we look upon these pages, we see that there must 
be a great variety in the forms and degrees and kinds of 
inspiration. The inspiration where a man is an eye-wit- 
ness of events which he is to record must be very unlike 
that needed when a man is uttering prophecy, the full 
meaning of which it may or may not be needful for him 
to comprehend. And yet in all of it there may be 
needed that superintendence which preserves from 
actual error, even in the record in things that have 
fallen under the direct notice of the narrator himself. 
And besides the evidence furnished in the volume 



70 A YOTOG MAX'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

itself, as to the kind and degree of this guidance, we 
must take the testimony of the writers of a book which 
we have found to be truthful, with reference to the 
fact of their inspiration. They claim, and their work 
proves it as well as their words, that their work is two- 
fold in its character. It is human, they say. And they 
say, just as distinctly, that it is the work of God's in- 
spiring spirit. 

Beginning, then, on the human side, in our descrip- 
tion, we should say that we have here in the Bible a 
book written, not by angels, not by God, but by men. 
Their own description of the human element is given in 
the words of one of them as he speaks of his work and 
that of the others. It is this ; " Holy men spake as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost." Notice the re- 
cognition of the human element. 

"Holy men spake." They were voluntary agents, 
using their own human language. But they " spake as 
moved by the Holy Ghost." 

And in this combination of a human element and a 
divine element, we have not partly the one and partly 
the other ; not one text fallible and the next infallible. 
But all of it is of man, and all of it is of God. God 
penned not one word. Man wrote it. Man wrote not 
one word by himself unwatched, unassisted of God. So 
that it is both man's word and God's word. It is the 
work of Moses, Isaiah, John, Paul, and the rest of them. 
And yet at the same time it is God's inspiration of 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 71 

man's thought as he was " moved," and of man's word 
as he "spake." 

Or, approaching this matter from the divine side, as 
do these men sometimes in their descriptions, we hear 
them say, " All Scripture is given hy inspiration of 
God" So that we have an instance in which God takes 
up frail and imperfect men and human language in 
order to come near and reveal himself in human litera- 
ture, even as he has done in human nature by his Son 
Jesus Christ. 

And just as a superior overworks and absorbs an in- 
ferior power, so God infuses his thought into men, and 
secures its accurate expression by them. And thus they 
become his voluntary or his involuntary instruments. 
When they are bad men, as in the case of Balaam, the in- 
spiration is involuntary. These cases are few. And 
when they occurred, it was to confront and overwhelm 
evil prophets and evil men. But the Scriptures, it is 
claimed, were God's inspiration through good men to 
teach the world authoritatively the truth it needs to know. 
There is a human element ; and so we see various styles 
and methods of writing. But there is, we claim, a 
divine element, and this overspreads and animates the 
human ; the stronger using the weaker. As God is true, 
so his word is true. It is without admixture of error, and 
is thus a final authority in faith, in doctrine, in duty ; and 
it contains all about religion that we need to know or 
can know on earth. " The word of the Lord is perfect." 



72 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

Two men, intimate friends, are seated together at 
the same table. One of them will write a narrative of 
certain events on which he has a considerable degree of 
knowledge. It is necessary that the narrative should be 
accurate. The first shall write ; but the second, whose 
knowledge is full, accurate, perfect, will help the first 
man. He names no new items of information. But he 
corrects the impressions of the first so far as they are im- 
perfect. If a wrong word is about to be used by the 
first, the second man suggests the right one. If the pre- 
position to will convey the thought to be expressed 
better than the preposition of, he suggests that word 
in place of the other. He writes not a word him- 
self ; yet on the other hand not a word is written but he 
weighs its meaning and indorses or corrects it. In the 
narrative, as corrected and published to the world, you 
have the style of the first man, his peculiar methods of 
expression. It is his book. But it has also all the ac- 
curacy, all the thoroughness, all the inspiration of the 
second man. 

Given the Holy Spirit in the place of one of these 
men, and Matthew Mark or Luke, in the place of 
the other, and you have the very case before us. And 
the result is a human book, and a divine inspiration, a 
book all of man, and also a book all of God. 

Let us consider, next, some of the popular objections 
to the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. 

The individualism every where apparent in the 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 73 

volume has been urged as antagonistic to its claims. 
Paul does not write like John, nor David like Moses. 
And this fact has been alleged to be inconsistent with 
a divine revelation. To which it is enough to reply 
tli at there is no reason why God's inspiration through 
a man should change his style of writing any more than 
it should alter the features of his face. Indeed, these 
peculiarities are fresh proofs of the divine wisdom in the 
selection of fitting instruments to do a given work. To 
know men is kingly. To know them so as to use them, 
each in the best way, is proof of superior genius. A wise 
general employs subordinates according to their gift. 
Grant had his Sheridan for the valley of the She- 
nandoah, and his Sherman for the march from At- 
lanta to the sea. 

And when, in his providence, God has a work to be 
done, he has always a man to do it. In like manner 
when he has a revelation to give to men about matters 
touching eternal salvation, he selects not weak or un- 
suitable men. That would be to ignore his own infinite 
wisdom. But he has a Paul to write the epistle to the 
Eomans, and a David to sing the songs of holy experi- 
ence, and a Luke, the physician, to chronicle the life of 
Jesus, and a John to reason not through the brain like 
Paul, but to enwrap all truth in the roseate hues of his 
own loving heart. God makes no mistakes. Paul never 
has John's work to do. The inspiring spirit adapts 
means to ends. 



74 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

Another objection is drawn from the scientific allu- 
sions of the Bible. "A perfect volume/' it is said, 
"should be perfect in its science." Yes; we reply, 
if it attempts to teach exact science. But the Bible 
makes no such claim. It is a religious book ; re- 
cording facts from a religious point of view, and 
teaching men about God and duty. When it alludes 
to science, it adopts the scientific language of its 
various eras. No other course was possible for such a 
volume. Had it used the terminology, had it declared 
the discoveries of the centuries since it was written, 
the book would have been loudly denounced in all 
former centuries as false. A volume claiming to be five 
hundred years old that described the modern steam 
engine and the telegraph would be likely to awaken not 
only suspicion but derision. Indeed, had these scientific 
truths been here stated, the fair inference would have 
been that the Bible was a forgery. Then, too, if it had 
used the words of exact science, the world would in 
many things have utterly failed to understand it. And 
as to "exact scientific accuracy," about which so much 
is said, who will pretend that we have come to the 
era of perfect science ? We are, in our turn, to be 
laughed at a thousand years hence, for our mistakes in 
astronomy, in geology, in chemistry and in all the other 
sciences. Perhaps allusions to exact science, as it is to 
be in some coming time, would be riddles to us. 

" But does the Bible teach scientific error" asks 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIEED ? 75 

one. No ; it teaches nothing about science. 1 It names 
the facts of the physical world and the mental world 
as illustrations of moral truth. To-day we find, in the 
most careful writers even upon astronomy, allusions to 
the " rising and the setting" of the sun ; to " the ends 
of the earth ;" and to "the revolution of the heavens." 
To deny the accuracy of such writers because they em- 
ploy the popular phraseology of their times is absurd. 
A revelation from God in our human language must 
use the modes of speech, scientific, literary, or even reli- 
gious, which men commonly employ at the time when 
its writers are living. It can do nothing else. The 
attempt to do otherwise would awaken suspicion. And 
no course can be more unfair than to demand that a rev- 
elation from God shall tally with "the latest form of 
science," whatever that phrase may mean. For who 

1 What the writer would assert is, that science, in its classified 
and arranged form, is not distinctively taught. There are Biblical 
facts of Cosmogony, of Geography, and of Ethnology. The Bible 
goes not out of its way to state them. Some of oar Christian 
scientists have been at great pains to show that when it is said, 
" He hangeth the earth upon nothing," there is the scientific 
statement of a fact ; similarly some have dealt with the Mosaic 
account, which in advance of modern science, they say, has put 
the light before the sun, the plant before the seed, the period of 
fishes and plants before man. It is not intended, in the above, to 
assert that when the Bible teaches a fact, scientific, geographical, 
or ethnological, it is of no authority. Far from that. But as 
against objections, it is claimed that, in the mode of statement, its 
usual language is not that of scientific theory, deduction, and 
classification. " Science," says Webster, " is a collection of gen- 
eral principles or truths arranged in systematic order," 



76 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

shall tell us which of the conflicting theories of eminent 
geologists is to be taken as the standard on any question 
they have raised; say, if you will, on the question of 
the age of the earth. They differ from each other by 
tens of thousands of years. But if they agreed in plac- 
ing the age of the earth at any vastly distant period of 
the past, there would be no conflict with the Mosaic 
story. For interpreters there have been, even from the 
second century, who have stoutly insisted that the open- 
ing verses of Genesis describe an indefinite past age in 
which God created the matter out of which he subse- 
quently shaped the earth, as recorded in the succeeding 
verses of the sacred story. And not only are geologists 
divided among themselves, but they are in conflict with 
leading naturalists like Agassiz, and especially with 
leading astronomers like Thompson, who deny the im- 
mense age of the earth which is claimed by the theories 
of leading geologists. The "latest phase of science," 
is a difficult thing to be ascertained ; for these phases 
chase one another like cloud-shadows across a mountain- 
side, so that it requires a nimble eye to keep even some 
general knowledge of them as they come and go. 1 It 

1 Lamark held to "spontaneous generation" and the "variation 
of species." The view was so modified by Darwin as to be made 
antagonistic in fact to Lamark' s speculation. But Romanes' " phys- 
iological succession," if given any large place, is equally antago- 
nistic to Darwin's "natural selection," while Le Conte contends 
for intermittent advance. Wallace insists that Darwin's great doc- 
trine of natural selection is not proven ; and if proven would be 
entirely inadequate to account for the origin of man. Owen con- 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 77 

may be that the Darwinian theory of the ( ' survival of the 
fittest/' finds its real application when applied to the 
multitudinous theories of scientists. And yet all truth 
that is really gained, from whatever source, is gladly wel- 
comed by intelligent believers in the Scriptures. For 
they hold that the facts of the world of God and of the 
word of God will stand. Science is the name we give to 
the interpretation of the one ; theology is the name we 
give to the interpretation of the other. Neither science 
nor theology can add a fact or change a fact. There 
are the facts in the world and in the word. We simply 
classify, and, as best we can, explain them. They often 
are mutually explanatory ; for they show in many things 
that they have a common origin in the mind and heart 
of God. When after the clash of theories, the truth has 
obtained the victory, when that has survived which was 
not always the most confident and most noisy in its 
claims, it has always been found hitherto that science 
and religion, the interpreters of God's world, and God's 
word were not aliens but friends. 

We can afford to wait when adverse theories rise 
with eminent men as their defenders. For the history 
of science, while it has its living achievements, is also a 
strand sown thick with opinions once earnestly defended 
and honestly believed, but now regarded not only as 

tends for the physical unity of the race, and Agassiz, while grant- 
ing the moral unity of the race, contends for different pairs in different 
geographical centres. 



78 

untrue but absurd. The truth about a created nature 
and the truth about an inspired Bible will survive ; and 
all the record of the past warrants the belief that these 
truths will be found evermore in essential agreement. ' 

Another objection to the inspiration of the Scriptures 
is drawn from the history of our usually received sacred 
books. It has been alleged, that the selection of these 
books was arbitrary ; that uninspired ones may have 
been included and inspired ones rejected ; that what 
is called the " Canon of Scripture," was made by men, 
their taste and judgment deciding what to accept and 
what to reject from a multitude of writings all profess- 
ing to be inspired. 

The reference is to the fact that some few hundred 
years after the death of Christ, a Council or Convention 
of churches made public declaration to the world as to 
what books had been believed from the first to be 
genuine Scriptures. For there were forgeries in that 
age. Heretics, unable to introduce new verses into the 
well known documents, devised new Gospels ; and here 
and there a man had been for a time deceived. But 
these apocryphal Gospels have come down to us. And 

1 The grand old book of God still stands, and this old earth 
the more its leaves are turned over and pondered the more it will 
sustain and illustrate the sacred word. — Dana. 

All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose 
of confirming the sacred Scriptures. — Herschel. 

In my investigations of natural phenomena, when I can meet 
any thing in the Bible it affords me a firm platform on which to 
Btand. — Mawry. 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 79 

any man who knows our four Gospels and then com- 
pares these apocryphal books with them, will not wonder 
an instant at the rejection of writings full of puerilities 
and absurdities — writings that carry, by their allusions 
to manners and customs absolutely unknown in the days 
of Christ, their own refutation ; writings the whole tone 
of which is utterly unlike that of the New Testament. 
And this is so evident that if these rejected books are 
true, our Gospels are false, and if ours are true these 
are an imposture. The inventors of these apocryphal 
gospels never designed them as substitutes, but only as 
additional gospels. But they go not together ; " the 
new agreeth not with the old." 

It is customary for some church creeds to make 
declaration as to the books they hold to be inspired. 
Churches did the same in the second century. This is done 
to-day where Eomanism prevails, to show that Protestants 
do not regard the Jewish books called the " Apocrypha," 
as having divine inspiration. A church of Christians 
at Salt Lake City would be very likely to make a state- 
ment of their belief in this matter, so that none should 
suspect them of believing in the pretended revelations 
of Joseph Smith. But he who should assert that such 
a declaration, made to-day, was an arbitrary or acciden- 
tal settlement of a question that was not settled as much 
before, would hardly be more wide of the truth than 
those who insist that a similar declaration in the second 
century was accidental and arbitrary ; and that it was 



80 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

then, for the first time, claimed that these books were 
inspired. God's people are intrusted with his Word, 
and it is their duty to make statements to the world of 
their belief. So did the early churches ; so do those of 
to-day. 

The alleged discrepancies of the Scriptures have been 
urged as an objection to its inspiration. It is admitted, 
nay claimed, that there have bee a and still are things in 
the Scriptures "hard to be understood." But their 
number is rapidly diminishing. Under discoveries in 
sacred geography, under explorations in ruins where 
long buried inscriptions give the missing facts that have 
explained hundreds of apparent discrepancies and have 
thrown light on verses of the Bible that seemed almost 
contradictory, under researches in natural science and 
ancient history, the things once thought to be stones 
of stumbling are many of them among the strongest 
confirmations of the truth of Holy Writ. And when 
larger investigations have been had, other difficulties 
without doubt, will vanish, and in their place shall 
stand new evidences. 

And when it is remembered that these books of the 
Bible were written by men who lived in lands widely 
distant from each other, in different ages, in different 
languages and dialects, in centuries in which there were 
different ways of computing time and also different 
eras from which to date the years, in which periods 
of time of the same name were of different lengths, and 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 81 

even days were differently arranged as to their hours, 
the only wonder is that we do not find more difficulties 
of this kind — difficulties that do not seriously impair 
the confidence of any candid man in the integrity of 
religious teaching of the Bible. These writers in giving 
lists of families, quoted from public official documents, 
and any error in official tables that did not affect their 
immediate purpose it was not theirs to examine and ex- 
pose ; they used here Jewish and there Roman methods 
of computation ; and probably, sometimes, Assyrian and 
even Grecian methods. The inspired Ezra reedited 
Moses, and gave, exactly as is done in modern works, a 
word or two as to the author's death. Different writers, 
living years apart, give in different words, and from 
different points of dating, the facts of Jewish history. 
They copy public documents in one case or rely upon 
personal memory in another, with exactly such small 
disagreements as might be expected. The differences 
touch nothing vital ; and all of them may be yet ex- 
plained by our fuller knowledge, as has been the case 
with other difficulties in the past. 

Our ignorance must not be set down as against the 
Bible itself. In nothing perhaps is our ignorance so 
great as in this matter of chronology. 1 And we have 

1 " Chronology is peculiarly difficult when we have to do with 
oriental modes of computation which are essentially different 
from ours." — J. R. Thompson. Hebrew and Arabic permit one to 
write first the units and then the tens and then the hundreds, or 
to reverse the order, and write the highest first. Hence con 

Jb 



exactly the same trouble in making out the figures of 
Josephus and other ancient authors as in the case of the 
Bible. The ease with which mistakes may be made 
when, as in all the older records of the race, letters are 
used for numerals, is acknowledged by every scholar. 
That such errors in matters not vital may have crept in, 
would not be denied by many fast friends of revelation. 
And yet others after the most careful study of years, find 
no need of admitting that there are such errors. In either 
case they never affect the reality of Christian fact or the 
substance of Christian doctrine. For the truth, which, 
as its friends claim, is here given, is not the truth of in- 
spired science as of Geology or Astronomy or Chemistry. 
It is moral truth as supported by the great historical 
facts of the dispensations which culminated in the 
advent of Jesus Christ. Nor do the friends of the 
Bible claim any miracle in its preservation but only such 
providential care that the books shall not become worth- 
less for the purposes for which they were given. For 
we may be certain that the God who guides the fall of 
the sparrow would not allow an inspired book which 
was of any use to the world to-day, to be lost. For this 
age needs, as does each age, a directory reliable and sure ; 

fusion and the liability to terrible over-statements in translation. 
The case in Samuel is an illustration, where " fifty thousand 
three score and ten men," are mentioned. Literally it is 
" seventy " and " fifties" and " a thousand," — which may mean 
either as in our version, or it may mean one thousand one hundred 
and seventy 



IS THE BIBLE IKSPIKED ? 83 

a volume without admixture of error in its statements 
of moral fact and human duty. 

In short, all the objections ever urged have one 
defect. They forget that the book is professedly human. 
They forget that the presence of the human element, so 
far from being an objection, is the very thing for which 
the friends of the Bible contend. No matter if Paul 
uses bad grammar, if Jesus speaks the impure Aramaic 
of his time, if Matthew writes with Hebrew idioms ; no 
matter if Luke uses round numbers rather than exact 
figures. These men are men ; and it is men for whom 
we claim inspiration. But they are men used of God as 
the stronger uses the weaker ; God's inspiration preserv- 
ing them from error when they utter religious truth. 
Did you ever stand beside the pilot of a noble ship as 
she bounded over the billows a thing of life ? Did 
you ever watch his eye as it glanced at the compass, then 
up at the sails, then over the side as he saw the coming 
wave ? If every thing goes right he stands motionless. 
But if he sees that a flaw of the freshening wind is 
about to change his vessel's prow but a trifle from the 
true course, how quickly he turns his wheel to meet the 
new deflecting force. Or if a broad wave, gathering on 
her quarter, is about to strike his ship from the line of 
her progress, swiftly he reverses his wheel. And thus 
amid all the disturbing influences of wind and wave, the 
pilot, with hand on the helm, guides the ship surely and 
safely in her unchanged path. So God guides the men 



84 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

through whom he will make known his will. The 
helm governs the ship. God .is the helmsman, and 
this is the bark. Amid all human imperfections, amid 
the veering of winds and the tossing of the waves, the 
helmsman never steers wildly, never loses his control, 
never is deflected from his course. Man's book, we 
most fully believe, has God's inspiration. 

There is proof that this volume is the inspired word 
of God. 

1. It is reasonable to believe that God will give some- 
where an inspired volume. No one has any too much 
light about religion. The wisest man, the loftiest soul 
among the Greeks declared that "the great want of 
the race is a book inspired of God." See the failure 
of men without it. They are like the dove sent from 
the ark, unable to find rest for the weary feet. Some 
tell us that reason is enough without revelation. But 
the keenest and most philosophical mind of the ancient 
time, the Greek mind, was busy at the problem of reli- 
gion for centuries. And the result of the study of the 
finest, clearest, most penetrative thought of the race is 
seen every where else. In literature, in the plastic arts, 
in oratory, that mind leads still the world. But how 
about its religion ? What is the result here ? Just this ; 
that the traveller seated on one of the prostrate columns 
of the temple of Jupiter Olympus at Athens, is 
compelled to remember that "Jupiter, king of the 
Gods," has not a worshiper on earth to-day 1 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 85 

Is reason then of no avail ? Very far from that. 
We only say it is no substitute for revelation. It 
teaches just this ; the need, and so the probable supply 
of the great want of our race, viz., a revelation of God 
in human literature. It is reasonable to believe that 
God has revealed his will and our duty somewhere 
in the course of human thought. He has revealed him- 
self in other ways. Why not here, in the line of human 
literature ; and as a man discloses his thought in a book, 
why not God use the same simple and obvious and ex- 
pected method in revealing his thought unto the race ? 
Indeed such a book is a necessity for us as much as light 
for the eye, and air for the lungs. God made the want 
in us, and God has made the supply. Otherwise we 
are left to men's conflicting guesses, and inevitable 
weaknesses, and perpetual mistakes in matters most 
vital to our souls' interests. There are things we need 
to know, and which we never can know unless God tells 
us ; for only God can know them of himself. 

And if God must reveal himself in literature we may 
expect it in inspired documents concerning his Son 
Jesus Christ. And if this Bible is not that revelation, 
then somewhere in connection with the record of these 
facts it must be found. There is no competitor. It is 
this or none. There is not even the resemblance of a 
claim anywhere else. Even Mahomet claimed no reve- 
lation directly from God. It was through the angel 
Gabriel that his pretended inspiration came. Outside 



86 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

this Bible I do not know a book on earth claiming 
divine inspiration. 

The intuitions of our hearts teach us this need and 
also prepare us to expect that somewhere there is a rev- 
elation from God about religious truth. Some have 
said a man's own intuition or spiritual insight is enough. 
But how is this ? Theodore Parker's insight affirms 
"man is immortal." But Mr. Newman, over the sea, 
declares that his consciousness says nothing about it. 
Mr. Herbert Spencer " thinks we cannot know any- 
thing by our consciousness, insight, or in any other way 
about God, whether there is or is not such a being ; " 
while Mr. Parker thinks that " we are all directly con- 
scious of God." 

The truth is that, left alone to their own conscious- 
ness or insight, men can never come to an agreement 
as to the beliefs at the basis of religion. Their diver- 
gences on first truths show the need of a revelation 
from God to take us up just where our feeble intuitions 
fail, and to carry us on and out of the twilight into 
the perfect day. 

God is. But who save he himself can tell us what 
he is ? For who but he knows ? Man is immortal. 
But where, and in doing what is that immortality to be 
passed ? "Who can tell save God ? For none but he, 
with omniscient eye, can see the interminable future. 
Is there a heaven and a hell ? and are they eternal ? 
God must tell us. What will men do in eternity ? God 






IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 87 

only can see and know as of himself. We know only as 
he tells us. We are sinners. It is the consciousness of 
the race. Can sin be forgiven ? God only knows on 
what terms he will forgive ? We know from him, and 
if he has told us ; not otherwise. The soul of man can 
never rest except in some authoritative expression of 
God. Our great soul- want is for something more certain 
than guesses about religion, or the differing conclusions 
of reason, or the partial intuitions of our hearts. We 
need something reliable, and sure ; we need ' ' the truth 
without any admixture of error." All the vast systems 
of ancient belief proclaim this want ; all the struggling 
of men's souls to find a resting place declares it. It is 
one of the most unmistakable wants of the race. We 
claim that God has undertaken to supply this want. 
And will he be likely to do it by an imperfect book ? 
Will he give us a revelation with error in it when the 
only purpose of giving it at all is to save us from error ? 
We can err and guess without a Bible. What we need 
is not the mere afflatus of the poet or the dream of the 
enthusiast ; but a book of Certainty with the divine 
stamp upon it. 

It is worthy of note that every man has a final 
authority in this matter of religion ; if not the Bible, it 
is something else. The Romanist declares that the 
Bible alone is not enough ; it must be interpreted by 
authority of the church — a company of men. The 
modern sceptic seeks his authority in his own reason. 



88 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 



He says " This or that thing in the Bible is unreason- 
able tome; I cannot believe it. This fact, plainly, is 
impossible ; that doctrine goes against my convictions." 
And so he sets his own private authority higher than 
God's word. But mark it ; Sceptic and Romanist agree 
in trusting human authority ; one trusts man, the in- 
dividual ; the other trusts men, the church. But both 
have something they call authority, though it is only 
human authority. For there must be some final ground 
for rest. We take God. They take men. 

We claim that there is an absolute need of divine 
authority, if men are to know about religion. We want 
a revelation from God ; — inspired too, in every part, by 
God's Spirit For a book sometimes true, sometimes 
false is worse than none ; just as a guide sometimes 
trustworthy and sometimes treacherous is more danger- 
ous than no guide at all. 

Again the early Christians received these books as 
inspired. We have the writings of persons who con- 
versed with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And 
these uninspired but honest men, always quote our sacred 
books with marks of respect ; putting a wide difference 
between these and all other books. These early Christian 
writers, call them the " Divine Scriptures," " Scriptures 
of the Lord," " Divinely inspired Scriptures," " Sacred 
Books," ( ' The Ancient and New Oracles," " Gospels," 
"Divine Oracles," "Holy Scriptures." Surely these 
names are significant. Moreover they quote not from 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 89 

general tradition but from these books when they wish 
to state the facts and the doctrines of religion ; quoting 
them as final authority. So frequently did they quote 
the New Testament that scholars have said that the 
whole volume could be collected from the citations in 
the writers of the few earlier centuries. 

Again ; the Book claims inspiration. A former 
chapter has been devoted to the question of the general 
truthfulness of the Bible. In the book itself we find 
that God promises divine guidance. He said to Moses " I 
will be with thy mouth. " The prophets were to speak, 
" in the name of the Lord." And these prophets them- 
selves claimed this inspiration. " Hear the word of the 
Lord." "The Lord hath spoken." "Thus saith the 
Lord," is their usual formula. Moreover our Lord and 
his apostles indorsed the Old Testament. " Search the 
Scriptures," said Jesus. And he was continually saying 
" as it is written," and " that it might be fulfilled." It 
is said, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God." 
" Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Spirit." If it is possible by any words to enter 
the claim of inspiration from heaven it is done in these 
declarations. Nor is this all. Jesus promised to inspire 
his disciples. He promised the Holy Spirit, who should 
" bring all things to their remembrance whatsoever 
he had said, and should also guide them into all truth." 
Can any thing be more decisive than such a promise ? 
If then we have not an inspired volume, containing 



90 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

" all truth," Jesus spoke not truthfully, or his biog- 
raphers have misrepresented him. His disciples, after 
his death, claimed this promised guidance. Says one 
of them, " ye received the word of G-od which ye heard 
of us, not as the word of man, but as it is in truth the 
word of God." How sharp the distinction made by 
the Apostolic pen between words which possess only 
human authority, and those which have also that of 
God ! And this is only a siugle instance out of the 
multitude of similar claims. 

Something must be done with such claims. They 
are too frequent, and too broad to be ignored. They 
occur continually in the Bible. They are either quietly 
assumed or expressly declared in the whole volume. 
Open the Epistles any where you please. Hear the 
writers announce the most momentous truths. Do they 
reason as with human logic ? Do they offer to prove 
them as do ordinary writers ? On the contrary, they 
generally announce them in a way which shows insuffer- 
able arrogance if they are not inspired ; but which is 
just what we should expect if their authority was the 
divine guidance they claim. And thus it comes to be 
true that these immense claims are either very arrogant 
and wicked, and I had almost said, blasphemous ; or else 
they are rightful and just, and demand reverence as 
coming from heaven. Yery bad men, and very 
wretched enthusiasts were these writers on the one 
hand ; or else on the other they were good, honest, and 



IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED ? 91 

righteous men ; — men who were imperfect in themselves, 
but, as they claim, infallible when, under God's inspira- 
tion, they were teaching religious truth. In this claim 
of inspiration they were outrageous liars, whose preten- 
sions should move our ridicule if not our indignation, 
or else they were true men, " chosen of God," to speak 
"as moved by the Holy Ghost." Scepticism in our 
day compliments the Bible as an excellent book with 
many valuable things in it ; but hesitates to allow it to 
be inspired of God and an infallible guide. We rejoice 
that this ground has been taken. It is a slippery 
ground. No man can stand long upon it. For the 
Bible claims to be inspired. That claim is true or false. 
If false, can we trust auy thing in the book ? If false, 
this is a most prodigious falsehood. A little error in a 
man's words may not vitiate the main sentiment even 
when it awakes a degree of suspicion. But if the error 
be of large import, and lie at the very basis of the whole 
statement it is far otherwise. Now here is a claim con- 
tinually made in the Bible, -and a most important claim, 
nay, the most important of all its claims. If false, the 
whole book is radically false ; if true it is "the word of 
God." There is no middle ground. It insists not that 
it is simply a very good book, with excellent sentiments, 
not that it is, like any production of good men, of 
merely human authority. It disclaims this in claiming 
to be very much more. 

We believe the volume . is true. We accept it as 



92 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

written by man, but written under divine guidance. 
They who have received it " not as the word of man 
but as it is in truth the word of God," have felt the 
more sure of its inspiration as they have studied it, and 
have yielded their hearts and lives to the control of the 
facts and doctrines. It has done them good to take it 
as an inspired book. They make it their final authority. 
" Thus saith the Lord," is the basis of their confidence 
in any religious belief. 

And there is one thing about this book, by which, 
over and above all our reasonings, we may settle the 
whole matter of its truth or falsehood. We may use 
the Baconian method with it — the method of experi- 
ment and trial, and then of inference as the result of 
our experimental method. "If any man will do his 
will," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine." 
This is perfectly fair. We are not asked to do things 
evil that good may come ; but only to do what is obvi- 
ously right ; to begin with the nearest duty ; to practice 
at once on precepts that commend themselves. The 
book asks you to try it. " Come and see," its grand 
message. Here is a personal test that a man may make 
for himself. As far as it commends itself, obey it. It 
bids you pray for wisdom. Do it as you would be a fair 
minded man and prove yourself desirous of knowing the 
truth. Enough has been shown in the argument thus 
far on the genuineness, authenticity and inspiration of 
the Scriptures to convince every thoughtful reader, that 



IS THE BIBLE INSPLRED ? 93 

this book is worthy of a very careful examination. Can 
you give it so much as this, without prayer for guidance 
and the solemn determination, just here, to do right in 
regard to your Bible and your God. For as you would 
not call him an honest man who used carefully his ears 
and would not use his eyes in investigating the common 
things of life, so in these higher things, it is needed 
that a man use not only brain but heart, not only the 
method of ordinary search but the peculiar method that 
befits this kind of investigation — the method of prayer. 
Yes ; God has spoken to man. And there are thou- 
sands of the race who have listened with the reverent 
ear of the soul. And the utterances of God in his 
Word have made them men of a higher purpose and a 
better aim. The lowly have come and made God's truth 
their comfort and hope, and it has lifted them to a 
higher manhood. And think of how many of the most 
lordly souls the world has seen have brought their trea- 
sures of learning and of science to the feet of him to 
whom the Magi bowed. For the world's scholarship 
and science, and art, and culture are on the side of the 
Bible. 1 Little eddies of opposition there are in every 

1 " Who founded Prague and Vienna and Heidleberg and Leip- 
sic and Tubingen and Jena and Halle and Berlin, and Bonn ? 
Who founded Salamanca and Valladolid and Oxford and Cam 
bridge and Aberdeen ? They were Bible men. When the rest of 
mankind were caring for the mere necessities of the physical 
life, Bible men were holding the torch of science ; and these men 
were the predecessors of the Bacons and Newtons. Who founded 
American colleges ? With very few exceptions, they were Bible 



94 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

age; "the opposition of science falsely so called.'* 
But the little eddy near the bank could not exist if there 
were not further out, even in the broad and deep 
channel, a vast volume of water floating steadily down 
towards the sea. And these great souls, the real leaders 
of the world's thought, have weighed all the difficulties 
that any sceptic has ever raised ; for the modern objec- 
tions have little of newness. And these men have gone 
through all this sea of difficulties ; and did not stay 
weak and floundering in that Slough of Despond as 
feebler souls have done. They have landed on the 
further shore of a careful belief. They know why they 
believe the Bible. But, over and above every other 
reason, they can say with Coleridge — and men in every 
grade of intellectual and moral development can join 
in the utterance, — " I know the Bible is inspired because 
it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other 
book." 

men. Newton was only one of hundreds, who, given to science, 
loved his Bible. From his day to this the succession has been com- 
plete. And the science that in our day boasts such Bible men as 
its Faraday, its Forbes, its Carpenter, its Hitchcock, its Dana and 
its Torrey, cannot be considered as occupying a position hostile 
to the Bible." — Howard Crosby, D. D. , L L. D. , Lecture before 
New York Association for Science and Art. 

" Now if Christianity is the foe of science has she not taken a 
singular method of demonstrating her enmity ? Christianity 
was the first as she still remains the fast and fostering friend of 
science. The devotion of the Christian church in this century to 
education is one of the notable facts, and it points with pride and 
satisfaction to its educational institutions." — J". O. Holland. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Difficulties as to Mibacles and Teachings. 

In Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress/' midway be- 
tween the city of Destruction which Christian must 
leave and the wicket gate opening into the narrow way 
where he would enter, there was a certain bad piece of 
ground called the " Slough of Despond." Into it every 
pilgrim must go. Some retreated after a few steps, 
coming out on the same side on which they had entered. 
Some remained, hopelessly fastened in the terrible quag- 
mire and perished there. Some also, went on, went 
through, and came out safely, nor did the mud cleave 
to their garments when they stood once more on the 
firm ground. In like manner, there is a period, more 
or less definite and continued, in every young man's 
life, which may be termed the period of natural scepti- 
cism. It is the time when doubts come up like thick 
banks of cloud in the eastern horizon from a wintry sea ; 
the time when a young man sees and feels the force of 
the objections to religion ; when he finds grave and 
serious difficulties in his Bible. 

A young man has been tenderly and carefully trained. 
He has religious parents. He has every advantage of 



96 A YOTOG MA^'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

Sabbath-school and sanctuary. He bears indeed of objec- 
tions to religion. But they are mainly answered in the 
books he reads, and in the family conversation to which 
he listens. He believes his Bible. The men about him 
who live it and strive to practice it, though imperfect 
men, are widely different from the noisy profane crowd 
that he occasionally encounters. He is a believer in 
religion. He holds fast to his Bible. But there comes 
a change. He feels the strength, the vigor, the impa- 
tience of authority, the natural independence, which is 
inevitable as the young man takes his place in life. He 
feels competent to undertake almost any thing. He 
hears new objections to particular portions of the Bible. 
It occurs to him that a good deal of his faith in the Scrip- 
tures is the result of education. He has taken many 
things for granted. He is beginning to think that, had 
he been trained up a Turk, he might have been a 
Mohammedan ; or educated a Hindu, he might have 
reverenced the Shasta. This is all true enough ; and 
it amounts simply to saying that if a man had been 
badly trained the results would be likely to be bad. As 
an argument against a correct religious belief, it is as 
poor as would be the argument against sound learning 
that bad text books would tend to make poor scholars. 
Right views of science are none the less correct because 
a man was trained up to know them. But our young 
man is independent, self-reliant, able now to investigate 
for himself. And he is tempted to think it only fair to 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 97 

do what sceptics assert is the mark of independence ; 
that is, to let all education in religion count for nothing. 
And afraid that he may be unduly balanced in favor of 
the Bible by his education, he leans the other way. 
Now, he harbors every difficulty. Early training must 
not solve it. He will meet these things himself. He 
falls in with some one who suggests that religion, espe- 
cially as a father and mother believed in it, has had its 
day ; that it is old, puritanic ; that the march of mind 
has left it far in the rear ; that it is independent and 
manly and strong-minded to doubt. Objections to this 
miracle, to that doctrine, and the other duty get a good 
deal of force in this state of mind. And the way is pre- 
pared for listening to one of those oily-tongued men 
who affect to pity persons who still hold to the Bible, 
and still believe in Christianity. "They wish they 
could," so runs their conversation, "believe in the 
Bible with the simple faith they had in childhood ; but 
they regret to say they cannot ! They have very grave 
doubts ; would like to have them solved ; but have no 
hope that they ever will be." They tell the young man, 
" Ah ! when you know more of philosophy, and of the 
progress of free thought, you will feel differently about 
your Bible ; and a young man of sense and spirit and 
originality like yourself, will never be content to believe 
a thing is true because your mother told you so." 

Now in this state of things the appeals of religion 
are not felt. The young man's faith is more thoroughly 

G 



98 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

undermined than he himself suspects. He does not 
exactly disbelieve. But he does not feel sure. He asks 
himself whether there may not be some mistake ; 
whether there may not be error in the Bible after all ; 
whether it may not be true that religious men over-state 
Christian doctrine. At least one must not be in haste 
to commit one's self for or against religion. And this 
is the point at which the scepticism of our day is all 
directed. It does not ask that a man be a disbeliever, 
but only an unbeliever ; not that a man deny but only 
that he should doubt. For if there be such objections 
to religion, such difficulties in the Bible that its truths 
are neutralized, it is all that scepticism can expect to 
gain in an age like this. 

I want to put out a helping hand to any young man 
who has entered in any degree into this Slough of De- 
spond, and who feels embarrassed by the difficulties he 
finds in his Bible. 

There are two ways of meeting these difficulties. 
One way would be to state each of them at full length 
and then answer it. But this would require volumes. 
There is another way. It is Peter's way when he said, 
" Lord to whom shall we go ; thou hast the words of 
eternal life." Some were leaving Christ because of 
their difficulties. Peter stops a moment and bethinks 
himself. I seem to hear him as he reasons with himself, 
" Suppose I leave Christ and his doctrine, what shall I 
gain ? To whom shall I go ? Shall I find no difficulties 






AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 99 

in rejecting the miracles and teachings of Jesus ? What 
account can I give of all these evidences of his religion ; 
for these will be prodigious difficulties to me as an un- 
believer." And then, turning again to Christ, I seem 
to hear him say, " Lord, to whom can we go, Thou 
hast the words of eternal life." To every young man 
troubled with difficulties in his Bible I say stop, and 
think a moment as to what would you gain by rejecting 
the Bible ? Are there not prodigious difficulties in tak- 
ing that position ? There are difficulties with the 
Bible ; but there are ten-fold more without it. There 
are difficulties in believing ; but there are infinitely 
more difficulties in the position of the sceptic and even 
of the doubter. Let a man magnify these difficulties a 
thousand fold and it would be still true that the dif- 
ficulties of unbelief are far more formidable. 

We shall see this, first, if we name certain Scripture 
facts in which men have found great difficulties. 

I name miracles as one of them. The Bible cer- 
tainly contains a narrative of miracles. They are in- 
terwoven with the whole texture. It is impossible to 
believe the Bible and interpret it fairly without believ- 
ing that miracles have been wrought by God in former 
ages of the world. Some join issue just here, declaring 
that miracles are incredible in themselves, and some 
asserting that a miracle is impossible. 

But when a man asserts that a miracle is impossible, 
he should stop and ask himself if he is aware of what he 



100 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

assumes ; of the prodigious difficulties he takes upon 
himself. "Miracles are impossible," he says. How 
does he know ? Is he omniscient ? Is he omnipresent ? 
Does he know all the things that have transpired or that 
are now transpiring in this universe ? If not, then the 
thing he does not know may be a miracle. There is a 
prodigious difficulty in the way of a finite man who 
would acquire infinite knowledge. And one would 
think there would be some difficulty in finding a man 
whose modesty had been so far forgotten as to allow 
him to make the assumption implied in the statement 
" a miracle is impossible," — the assumption of omni- 
science ; the assumption that one is himself God ! 

Is it said again,' " that if not impossible miracles are 
very improbable ; that the laws of nature are uniform ; 
that God would not be likely to institute an order of 
nature and then arbitrarily break through the laws he 
has established." To all this the reply is instant ; viz., 
That no one alleges miracles to be common ; that, com- 
mon, they would cease to be miracles. It is admitted 
at once, that they are not probable as every day occur- 
rences. Nor is their commonness claimed. But only 
this ; that at certain periods of time, when they were 
needed, God thrust in miracles for man's good. In all 
those great crises of human destiny, in all those eras 
when a new dispensation was to be inaugurated, when 
Moses was to be God's instrument in introducing the 
legal dispensation, when the prophets were to appear 



AS TO MIEACLES AND TEACHINGS. 101 

with divine credential, when Jesus was to come from 
heaven to give testimony of a new way of salvation — at 
each and all of these points of intense interest, we urge 
that it is not only probable that God will thrust in his 
hand of miracle, but without such miracle the world 
would have been more astonished than with it. For God 
made man to expect miracle, to demand miracle, and, 
when the miracle comes in the very hour of greatest need, 
to believe in it and to magnify the name of the Lord for 
what he has done. Has God put this expectation of 
miracle in man, as a deep and vital thing, on purpose to 
disappoint it ? The absence of miracle under such cir- 
cumstances is far more improbable than its presence. 

And here, a word about the laws of nature, to which 
as has been alleged, "God has bound himself." But 
where has he bound himself thereto ? Surely no man can 
show the pledge that God will never override physical 
law when he shall choose so to do. What is a law of 
nature ? It is God's usual way of doing things. What 
is a miracle ? God's unusual way of doing a thing. Is 
it any more difficult for God to do his will in the one 
way than in the other ? Surely no law binds him to do 
it in a particular way. For in that case God would be 
imprisoned in his natural laws. And these laws would 
be the grave of his omnipotence. Even the silk-worm 
that spins its own winding sheet, at length bursts 
through its prison. Is the infinite one entombed in hiss 
own world? Besides what are these " laws of nature/ 



102 a young man's difficulties with ins bible. 

considered as a restraint upon a being endowed with 
will? 

It is a law of nature that my arm shall hang down 
at my side. It weighs just so much avoirdupois weight , 
and is attracted by just so much force to the centre of 
the earth. When I lift my arm I overwork the law of 
gravity. My will, practically, and within a limited 
range, suspends the results of law. The law exists. It 
acts. But I counteract it. A new force, supernaturally, 
is thrust in. My will is above nature ; is stronger than 
nature ; is supernatural. Now if I can work right over 
nature, right above her laws, cannot God more also ? 
If I am not a prisoner of law, is he bound thereby ? If 
there is a human supernatural, according to which I 
act above nature, thrusting in a new force, is there any 
difficulty in believing that there is a divine supernatural 
which can work miracles 9 It would be strange that a 
man having the power of will should never use it by 
lifting an arm or leg ; and it would be even more 
strange if God, with the power to work through law or 
over law, by law or in spite of law, should not, when 
miracle is called for, work the needed miracle. The 
real wonder is that miracles are so few ; that God so 
holds himself to law, i. e., does things so much in similar 
ways. The entire absence of miracle under these cir- 
cumstances is the most improbable of things. If God 
had not, at the fitting time, thrust in his hand and 
wrought marvellous works for signs, wonders, tokens 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 103 

unto man, and if the Bible had not contained this re- 
cord of miracles, the omission would be a greater hin- 
drance to our faith in God and in the Bible, than any 
other that I know. 

That God should perform miracles is, then, not only 
possible but probable. And he who says that God can- 
not, or that he will not do it, involves himself in a host 
of difficulties any one of which is overwhelming. 1 That 
the Bible should record miracles is only what it pro- 
fesses to do. For, just as ordinary histories record for 
the most part ordinary facts, so God's word records those 
extraordinary instances in which divine love and power 
have spoken in the language of miracle to arouse atten- 
tion, confirm truth and overthrow the powers of evil. 
Nor let any man when in his Bible he meets the record 
of a miracle say, " 0, that is a miracle," — as if a 
miracle were somehow less credible, and less certain. 
Who objects to a book on mathematics that it contains 
figures, or to a book on botany that it describes plants ? 
It was intended to do so. And God's word describes 
among other things those deeds which men recognize as 
miraculous. It was intended to do so. Ponder these 
wondrous works, these mighty miracles. They are 
not freaks of power. They do not stand up apart. 
They are a portion of a mighty structure. They have 

1 " I will not believe a miracle." — Voltaire. 
" I will not believe that water becomes solid in winter, and 
men walk on it." — Japanese Prince. 



104 A YOTOG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

an appointed and an estimated moral value. As one 
studies them in their place, they exactly meet the 
needs of the hour when they were wrought. They ex- 
actly fit into the edifice that God is rearing. They 
are divinely given object-lessons for the instruction of 
the human race. The moral ends of miracle are the 
greatest things. For moral ends are final ends. 

Again ; there are objections to these facts of the 
Bible because of their remoteness. " They occurred so 
long ago ; there is so much opportunity for mistake ; 
they do not come home to us like the things done in 
these last critical centuries ; " so runs the objection. 
It is replied, that it is impossible to thrust all events into 
one century. This nineteenth century cannot spread 
over more than one hundred years. A man's difficulty 
on this score with his Bible is a mere impression, and 
is unworthy of him. And as to the antiquity of the 
events, of course they are ancient ; that is what the 
record asserts. And as to the authenticity of the more 
ancient of them, we have to go back only to Christ's 
day ; to the time which all allow to be far within the 
period of authentic and reliable history. He authenti- 
cated Moses, and David, and Solomon, and Isaiah. 
He indorsed the Old Testament miracles, reasserting 
their truthfulness, confirming the most difficult things 
in Moses' account ; so that now we believe them, not 
only on Moses' testimony, but on the comparatively 
modern, and also superhuman testimony of Jesus Christ 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 105 

himself. There are difficulties, it is said, in the narra- 
tive of these ancient events. Well. Be it so. But the 
difficulties are absolutely insuperable in the way of be- 
lieving that our Lord Jesus Christ sent men to the Old 
Testament, saying, "search the Scriptures," when he 
knew the first pages of Genesis to be false, and the 
prominent events of creation and early human history to 
be misstated. It is said, " that even eighteen hundred 
years is a long while ago, and that since that time there 
have been opportunities for falsification of facts." The 
reply is that all the world believes in events recorded 
hundreds of years before Christ's day by ordinary his- 
torians. Those were for the most part ordinary events. 
But here in the New Testament are extraordinary 
events, recorded in solemn and authentic documents. 
Within a few years after the events are said to have oc- 
curred, the writers gave names, dates and places ; they 
said that in a certain town just over the hill from Jeru- 
salem, Jesus raised a dead man ; and his very name, 
Lazarus, is mentioned ; his sisters' names given ; their 
house specified ; the very sepulchre described. They 
said that yonder, he fed five thousand men in the wil- 
derness : they gave these facts in all this minuteness of 
detail. Any body could examine the facts. These 
things were not done in a corner. They were noised 
abroad. They created intense interest. If there had 
been any mistake, the able and acute foes of the new 
religion would have proclaimed it. The Jews said the 



miracles were done by Satan. The heathen said they 
were done by magic. But both admitted that the thing? 
were done. And both appealed to our Matthew, Luke, 
Mark and John, as the historians of the facts. Here 
are the records in the Bible, — a book existing to-day. 
The sceptic is just as much bound to account for the 
book as it now exists, as is the Christian. But the sceptic 
has the most prodigious difficulties in his way. And if 
any young man attempts to stand between the two, to 
stand as a doubter, neither believing nor rejecting, then 
he is swept by the batteries of both sides. For, whoever 
is right, the man who is undecided is certainly wrong. 

"With reference to many a speculative question often 
associated with the discussions of Christianity, nothing is 
gained but much lost by leaving Christ's teachings. 
There are the inquiries about the introduction of sin, 
the transmission of diseased moral natures, of the preva- 
lence and cause of sorrow and death, of how so much 
suffering can exist either here or hereafter and yet God 
be good, of the sovereignty of holiness and yet the allow- 
ance of sin, of God's all comprehending plan and yet 
how evil can come in as an ordained part while infinite 
holiness is unstained, of God's supremacy and man's 
freedom and so accountability — these are examples of 
the questions to which I refer. 

I am free to confess that on these and kindred sub- 
jects there are great difficulties. But will there be less 
difficulty if we reject the Bible ? Did the Bible origi- 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 10? 

nate these questions and will the rejection of the Bible 
solve them ? These questions have been discussed by 
all thinking men, whether heathens or Jews, whether 
Mohammedans or Christians, whether Infidels or Be- 
lievers. Outside of religion they have been debated as 
earnestly by sceptics, as ever among devout and prayer- 
ful men. 

He who rejects the Bible is as much bound to ac- 
count for the origin of evil, as really bound to show how 
man's free agency and the divine sovereignty can coexist 
as is any other man. For, if he is a Deist he holds to 
a belief in a Sovereign God ; and, on inspection of his 
own powers, he finds himself free. If he is not a 
Deist, he has other and more formidable difficulties ; 
he leaves doubt for darkness, difficulty for impossibility ; 
he plunges into depths which, fairly considered, would 
turn the brain of a sane man. 

All these inquiries belong really to another domain ; 
they are questions of philosophy. They would rear them- 
selves with the same frowning aspect if the Bible had 
never been given. Sir William Hamilton has said, 
" There is no difficulty in religion that has not first 
emerged in philosophy." Only as we have all been reared 
among Christian influences, we have heard these ques- 
tions discussed in their religious bearing, until we asso- 
ciate them with religion itself, and so unconsciously we 
transfer the difficulties in the one to the charge of the 
other. This is unfair. Hume spent his life over these 



108 A 1EOUKG man's difficulties with his bible. 

very questions, looking upon them as a philosopher. 
Let no man present as his reason for the rejection of 
Christianity those speculative difficulties which undeni- 
ably exist, which are as formidable without the Bible as 
with it, and which, if not completely solved by revela- 
tion, are, in not a few respects, relieved and mitigated. 

If we reject the explanations of Christ so far as he 
gave them, what then ? To whom shall we go ? 

As with speculative questions so with practical facts. 
There are perplexities about them. But one gains noth- 
ing by rejecting Christ's religion on this account. Cer- 
tain things the Bible finds in the world. It did not 
make them. It is not responsible for their continuance. 
It simply records the things it finds to be the actual 
facts. Who thinks of charging a historian with the 
crimes he narrates, a writer on jurisprudence with the 
violations of law which he discusses, or a writer on 
medicine with the diseases he describes ? Common his- 
tory as well as sacred history records the fact of human 
guilt. Could a man write a pretended history of a 
nation who were not sinners, and get our belief that he 
was describing actual men! What, men — a nation of 
men, and not sinners ! No ! The world over, men dis- 
trust their race. Bars and bolts and heavy safes and 
careful locks guard property. 

Sin is a fact. The denial of Christianity is not the 
disproval of human sinfulness. Nay, if the doctrine of 
Scripture depravity seem at first view to be harsh and 



AS TO MIEACLES AND TEACHINGS. 109 

repulsive, think a moment that the sad fact is more 
frightful and awful if surveyed outside the limitations 
and alleviations of the Biblical presentation. The mass 
of the world's sin has been actually lessened by the con- 
version of millions through the Gospel. Christianity 
has been an elevating power over against this depravity 
I can think better of the world with than without the 
Bible, see less depravity if the Scripture is true than if 
it is false. For if religion is a delusion or a cheat, then 
not only do we behold the depravity of wicked men, 
but the added depravity of good men, who in that case, 
are miserable pretenders or else are most sadly deceived ; 
in other words, are either mentally or morally depraved 
beyond all the rest of mankind. And in addition to all 
other cheats and shams and lies under which men have 
groaned, we shall have, if we reject the Bible and take 
the infidel view, the most stupendous cheat and lie and 
delusion of Christ's religion. We must have some 
doctrine of depravity. It must be either the Christian 
or infidel doctrine, and the infidel doctrine is far more 
harsh and awful than that of the Bible. 

And the sorrow of this world and the other world 
which men charge against religion is not due to it, but 
is true in spite of it and in opposition to it. It is often 
urged that much suffering of conscience is endured by 
persons who believe in religion but do not actually obey 
the commands of Christ. This is true. But religion 
does not ask a man to disobey and so to suffer under an 



110 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 



accusing conscience. Eeligion asks this man to go on 
unto "peace in believing. " And it is unfair to charge 
the reproaches of conscience and the agonies of fear and 
the dread of losing the soul, which some endure in their 
theoretical belief but their practical rejection of Chris- 
tianity, to that religion which offers to the penitent 
calmness of conscience instead of agitation, and love and 
hope instead of fear and dread. If a man disobeys, and 
so is made sorrowful, let him complain not of religion 
but of himself. 

But men have felt anguish of soul who were far 
enough from being influenced, even in opinion, by reli- 
gion. Men have felt remorse who never heard of Christ 
or saw a Bible. In mid Africa or on the shores of fur- 
ther India men have had deep soul-sorrow as the con- 
viction has forced itself upon them that they were sin- 
ful and depraved ; and these men have made efforts 
almost superhuman to quiet, through worship and pen- 
ance and sacrifice, the voice of inward reproach. Scep- 
tics have died in sorrow, cursing the hour of their birth ; 
or, where great despair has been absent, there has been 
sometimes a puerile levity or an insensibility which 
seemed befitting only to a beast ; and the want of all 
that is comforting and elevating has been more sad than 
any despair, to the thoughtful beholder. 

Did any man ever hear of one who died cursing the 
religion of Christ because it had led him into sin, be- 
cause it had defiled and ruined him ? — But thousands 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. Ill 

have died with bitterest maledictions on the infidelity 
which destroys both soul and body. And in regard to 
the dire calamity of death, surely the gain is in the 
Christian view. Some insist upon associating the ideas 
of death with those of religion. As they turn instinct- 
ively from the thought of the grave's loneliness and cor 
ruption, so, since the thoughts are connected to them, 
they turn also away from religion. Death is indeed a 
stern fact. All must meet it. It comes to the swear- 
ing as well as to the praying man. 0, in this matter, 
we are all brethren ; and all of us must go down into 
the dust of death. If there is or is not truth in Christ's 
religion, this is true, we must all die. But, rejecting 
Christianity, we refuse the light from beyond which 
gilds the gates of the grave. And as to the sorrow be- 
yond the grave, religion names it that we may avoid it ; 
discloses the gulf that it may show us how to escape 
the unending grief and gain the unending joy. Even if 
it were a thousand fold greater, no man need endure it. 
Even if it were unjust, he who does right has nothing to 
fear. The more terrible the future sorrow, the more 
reason for not being among the wrong-doers against 
whom it is threatened. 

If we leave Christ and his doctrine we shall give the 
lie to all the best impulses and deepest intuitions of our 
nature. There are instincts, there are voices from 
reason and conscience. True our voluntary nature does 
not always obey them heartily, but the voices are there. 



112 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

The words may be somewhat indistinct. For the voices 
of our voluntary nature are louder, and we obey the 
wrong heart, rather than the right conscience, and 
therein stands our sin. But the other voices speak ; and 
sometimes the man must listen. " We are immortal," 
says a voice within us. Guilt may wish it were not so. 
But the reluctance to admit this inward testimony of 
men has not availed, and men for the most part be- 
lieve in a life after death. 

This belief the Bible assumes. It does not so much 
prove it, as take it for an accepted fact. But the doc- 
trine standing in outline only, or perverted by false 
teaching, is comparatively uninfluential. Christianity 
takes it, develops it grandly, clears it of all error, lifts 
it up from a dead belief to a living motive and a thrill- 
ing hope. It teaches every man how to make his im- 
mortality the grandest of blessings. 

Now suppose we leave Christ, what then ? We fall 
back upon our general intuitions ; definiteness is gone ; 
all influential motive has departed. Is it said that in- 
tuition gives us more than the bald and bare fact of im- 
mortality ? I must deny it. Men rejecting the Bible 
have widely various beliefs about the kind and char- 
acter of this immortality. It will not do to trust 
self ; for other people's reasons teach them, as they 
say, differently; and they may be as keen as we. If 
will not do to trust others ; for how collect the world's 
opinions and balance them in search of truth ? It is 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 113 

Christ's teaching or none. It is to him we must go that 
the intuition may become an influential faith. 

Another of these great ground principles of human 
thought and action is this ; that what we do now hears 
upon all our future. The belief is instinctive. We art 
and reason upon it daily. Few persons deny it ; and 
they, only in the matter of religion. All men see how 
results follow character and deeds. To-day you and I 
are experiencing partially the result of all former days. 
It will be so down to the last day of life. It will be so 
the day after death, the year, the eternity after death, if 
man continues to be man. 

The Bible owns this principle, and carries it out 
more fully, bids us act daily upon it, and tells us defi- 
nitely what the result will be of certain courses of action. 
" He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap cor- 
ruption ; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the 
spirit reap life everlasting." 

And now if any man objects to such a result ; if, 

wishing the doctrine not to be true, he shall throw 

aside his Bible, what will he gain ? He will not have 

annihilated this belief in the principle, which all men 

naturally entertain, whether believers in any religion or 

in no religion, and which all men act upon in daily 

life. The Bible indeed extends the application of the 

principle further than we, unassisted by revelation, can 

do ; just as the telescope extends our vision deeper into 

the heavens. The Bible tells us of two future eternal 

H 



114 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

states. Of the holy joys in one, of the sinful sorrows 
of the other. And before any man denies these utter- 
ances of the Bible let him ask what he will gain by the 
denial ? Thrown back upon the general principle, he 
must own that; and Christianity simply sheds new 
light along the old line of man's natural and instinctive 
conviction of immortality. 

If we leave Christ we shall do the greatest violence 
to our reasons by rejecting the immense amount of 
testimony which has convinced thousands of the lest 
minds of the truthfulness of Christ's religion. Look at 
the fact that the mass of men who have given deepest 
and most earnest thought and study to religion for 
eighteen hundred years have received the religion of 
Jesus. The men of most knowledge on this subject ac- 
cept the Bible as God's revealed will. They are intelli- 
gent enough to know all common and some uncommon 
objections, and yet they see where is the overwhelming 
weight of evidence. That great mass of educated mind 
which, as presiding over colleges, teaching in seminaries, 
has made Christianity a specialty, a single undivided 
object of investigation, is more than satisfied with the 
evidence for these books of the Bible. Intelligent men 
have indeed rejected the Bible. But general intelli- 
gence is one thing, and the special study of a life-time 
by thousands of the best educated men of each Chris- 
tian century is quite another thing. The overwhelming 
mass of ability and learning has had but one voice. 



AS TO MIEACLES AND TEACHINGS. 115 

Here is a stupendous difficulty for the sceptic ; a fact 
absolutely unaccountable by those who would have men 
leave Christianity. 

It is the same with the interpretation which the holy 
men of all centuries have put upon the doctrines of reli- 
gion. They are really one in this thing. They differ in 
explanations. The errors of their times influence their 
modes of statement. But the deeply religious, the 
really holy men of all the centuries are one in essential 
belief. 

They all agree as to man's sin and ruin and exposure 
to God's displeasure ; in redemption by Christ's death ; 
in salvation only by faith in him ; in the inward change 
of the Holy Spirit ; in the hope of eternal life through 
Jesus Christ for those who believe ; in the resurrection, 
the judgment and eternal awards. This is the Chris- 
tian faith. The mass of devout men since the reforma- 
tion three centuries ago, hold this as the truth. The 
mass of holy men in the Eomish church have held to 
these verities of our religion. Time was when the 
Roman church was a simple Gospel church on the banks 
of the Tiber. In subsequent centuries she was cor- 
rupted, not essentially in her creed, but in her rites, 
in her forms, which overlaid and well nigh, for many, 
extinguished her creed. And the reformers protested 
not against her creed, but against the mummeries which 
to many usurped its place. Her creed to-day is essen- 
tially right. Thousands in her communion think only 



116 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

of the mummeries and forget the creed. But many we 
believe have thought of the creed and have forgotten 
the mummeries. She has nurtured holy men. It is the 
same with that vast body, the Greek Church. Some have 
caught at the deeper truth and held it in spite of the 
tradition which stands to so many in place of the Gospel. 
And in those old Syriac churches, older than the 
churches in Eome or Constantinople, it is the same. 
The holy, the truly Christian men, those who give 
noblest evidence of piety, have clung to these few cen- 
tral doctrines of faith ; they are one in this interpre- 
tation of Christianity. And here is a fact which those 
would do well to ponder who are tempted to give up our 
Christian doctrines. These holiest men are in essential 
agreement. They hold one language about sin's ruin, 
and Christ's atonement, and the change of grace and 
the way to heaven. These are truths which they have 
tested by experience. These are the ground-work of 
their religion. And these are the pious men, if there 
have ever been pious men. Leaving Christ, in this 
matter, where shall we find genuine piety ? These holy 
men, the Edwardses, Paysons, Judsons of America, the 
Luthers and Calvins of the Protestant churches, the 
Thomas a Kempis, the Quesnels of the Eomish church, 
the Chrysostoms of the Ancient Greek church, the 
Jeromes and Gregories of those old Syrian churches, the 
men who prayed and thought and preached on the hilla 
and in the valleys that had seen Christ and his apostles, 



AS TO MIKACLES AND TEACHINGS. 11? 

all these holiest men, out of the depth of one experience 
have had one faith, and were one in their proclamation 
of the essential facts and doctrines of Christianity. 
We will not leave these men. To do it would be to 
leave the united conviction of Christendom. 

And, further, to cast off Christ's religion would be 
to leave all the dearest hopes both of our personal 
advancement and of the world's moral progress. Inter- 
twined with the facts of Christianity are our dearest 
affections. So that we must say with Paul, if the facts 
are not as presented in the life, death and resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, " we are of all men most miserable." 
We hear men sometimes with flippant tone announcing 
their belief that Christianity is false. But if that be so, 
say it sadly, and with tears, as you would tell a loving 
child of the death of the mother that bore it and nour- 
ished it and loved it. Say it as the most sorrowfu 1 
thing that human lips can utter, that the credentials of 
Christ — his mighty deeds and more mighty words — are 
not enough, and so never can God give a proven revela- 
tion to man. Say it with mourning, that the perfect 
purity and elevation and stainlessness of Christ's charac- 
ter in the New Testament is all a mistake ; that he did 
not live, or that if he did, his disciples devised his words 
and imagined his deeds, and that such deception has 
led the world's enlightenment, and so that we are all a 
duped race led by dupes, a race of maniacs led by fools 
and knaves ; and yet that these fools and knaves have 



118 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

wondrously helped men to be better, and made men 
holier, and broadened their views, and informed their 
intellects and enriched their moral natures, and made 
them to live nobler and more self-denying lives and to 
die sweeter, holier, happier deaths, looking onward to a 
still holier state ; and yet that all this is delusion, de- 
ception, mistake, imposture ! In striking at Christian- 
ity with iconoclastic hand one strikes at humanity as 
well as its dearest hopes, its sweetest consolations, its best 
ideals, its strongest impulses, its most praiseworthy 
charities and moralities. If it must be said at all, say 
it with bated breath, that Christianity is untrue ; for if 
untrue, it is the most awful of untruths and we ought at 
once to weed it out of human literature, out of common 
language and common life ; we ought to begin with child- 
hood and stop it in its repetition of the Lord's Prayer, 
to forbid infant lips from ever again uttering the words 
" Suffer little children to come unto me for of such is 
the kingdom of heaven ; " we ought to stop the rites of 
burial and cast out of them the words "I am the resur- 
rection and the life," to tell the mourner, though it will 
make him twice a mourner, that he has not only lost his 
friend but his Saviour ; we ought to assure age, though 
it will tremble all the more to know it, that there is 
some mistake as to the Bible which has been the staff on 
which it leaned, and that the Heavenly Father did not 
say, "I will never leave nor forsake thee," nor Christ 
promise, "He that believeth in me shall never die." 



AS TO MIRACLES AND TEACHINGS. 119 

And as with personal hope, so with the inspirations 
of genius and the progress of art and of learning ; for, 
the support of Christianity gone, there is for them a 
mournful future. Before the advent of Christianity, 
how much of art was too abominable for description. 
But the single conception of the Virgin and her Child 
cut in a thousand marbles, painted a thousand times on 
canvas, in every variety of detail, has revolutionized and 
elevated art. Nothing: blotted out the old ideals until 
Christianity flooded the realms of painting and statuary 
with a new and tender beauty. So always through the 
centuries this religion of Christ is purifying every thing 
it touches, and is doing it exactly as far and as fast as 
men take into mind and heart the great facts and doc- 
trines which are its distinction and its glory. 

Nor art and literature, but the common impulses of 
common life, would be ruinously affected if the religion 
of Christ were left as untrue. All the higher motives 
that lift men from a merely physical condition would 
droop. * With it would go all higher views of Cod, of 
duty, of the nobility of man, of just and humane law ; 
and society must inevitably decline, since the great 

1 That this is not a mere speculation the following quotation 
from the elder Pliny will show: "The vanity of man, and his 
insatiable longing after existence have led him to dream of a life 
after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most 
wretched of creatures, since the other creatures have no wants 
transcending the bounds of their natures. Among these two 
great evils the best thing God has bestowed on man is the power 
to take Ms own life." 



120 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

teachings of morals which have extorted the world's 
admiration have been connected with a system called 
Christianity, which the world now leaves because false ; 
— and if the one part false how the other true ? 

It has been thought by some that we might drop all 
the miracles and the doctrines that are distinctive, and 
still have all the impulses and moralities of Christianity. 
Yes, if moralities are mere outward things, mere wax 
flowers from milliners' shops, instead of genuine flowers 
growing on stems and out of seed and soil as God made 
them to grow. There is a natural belief in immortal- 
ity. But it is inoperative aside from the light of reve- 
lation. And as it has never been efficient apart from 
the Biblical disclosures, so it never will be for any length 
of time after the Biblical doctrine of it has been left. 
For a single generation, possibly for two, if Christianity 
were discarded, there would remain a little of the Chris- 
tian sap in Deism ; but it would soon depart. It is 
doubtful if mere natural religion would live long enough 
to draw another breath after the going out from it of all 
that is distinctly Christian in thought and feeling and 
belief. Says one of the best thinkers and best known 
educators of our day : " The course of things if Deism 
should be the ultimate religion, can be easily foretold. 
As long as the recollections and influences of Christian- 
ity survived its fall, earnest souls would hope on ; they 
would stay their souls' hunger on the milk drawn from 
the breasts of their dead mother. But a new age would 



AS TO MIEACLES AND TEACHINGS. 121 

toss about in despair. If a sense of sin remain, the life of 
all noble souls will be an anxious gloomy tragedy. Or 
if that burden be cast off, then the standard of character 
will fall and the sense of sin grow faint so that pardon 
will not be needed, and the utmost frivolity be reached 
iu life and manners." 1 

Nothing, absolutely nothing is given us in return if 
we surrender either our theoretic belief in Christianity, or 
our practical obedience to it. What else can do any 
thing for the deepest yearnings and largest wants of the 
soul ? Giving up Christianity is giving up the thing 
that ought to be true, just as there ought to be light if 
there are eyes, and sounds if there are ears, and air if 
there are lungs. And as the bodily organs are furnished 
with that on which they can best thrive, so the faculties 
of mind and heart can best be developed by the religion 
of Him who came " that men might have life and might 
have it more abundantly." For the deepest and most 
important intuitions man possesses are seized upon by 
religion and are made clear and influential. The germ 
of these truths is developed by the Scriptural doctrine, 
and they are made potent for man's good. All the diffi- 
culties are at least as great without as with the Bible ; 
as great in the germ-truth, as in its form of growth 
and bud and blossom. And then there is the added 
difficulty of accounting for this fact ; how it is that if 

1 Pres. Woolsey, in " Religion of the Present and the Future,* 1 



122 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 



Christianity is false, it can so singularly, powerfully, 
beautifully take up and develop these germ-truths in 
the mind and these most blessed hopes in the heart, and 
thus purify, elevate and ennoble the man who believes 
and practices it. 



CHAPTER V. 

Difficulties fkom Geology. 

It has come to be believed by many persons that 
there is a direct conflict between Genesis and Geology ; 
that the Scriptural account of the creation of the world 
and of man is entirely at variance with the results of 
the best modern scientific study. And there has been 
not a little doubt awakened in the minds of many young 
men as to the accuracy of the Scriptures on this partic- 
ular subject. It is believed that these difficulties, 
stated so often in newspaper and magazine, in popular 
lecture and scientific volume, are the result of the igno- 
rance of some scientists as to the actual teachings of 
revelation ; and also of the equal ignorance of some 
Biblical scholars as to the actual teachings of science. 
There is undue haste on the part of some men of large 
but exclusive acquaintance with science, to denounce 
the Scripture story; and equal haste on the part of 
some friends of the Bible to denounce science as athe- 
istic. Crude theories in the interpretation of the book 
of nature or of the book of revelation are often at blame 
for the apparent antagonism of things in which, 
rightly understood, there must be unity. 



124 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

Our best Biblical scholars who have a fair knowl- 
edge of scientific facts gladly welcome any light that 
science gives to religion, acknowledge gratefully their 
indebtedness for the past, and express their fervent 
hope and belief that more light is to come from every 
department of human knowledge in aid of the study of 
that book which they hold more and more firmly to be 
the attested Word of God. "All knowledge," said 
Cicero, "is of use to the orator." And every student 
of the Scriptures will say the same about the inter- 
pretation of that volume. And, on the other hand, the 
geologists are indebted, as some of them gladly and 
reverently own, to the Biblical story for the wonderful 
help it furnishes toward the explanation of the facts 
which they cull from the natural world. Truths never 
disagree when you get at them and bring them together. 
The outer court of nature and the inner court of revela- 
tion were built by one hand ; and the architect and 
builder is divine. 

I propose that we read together the first chapter of 
Genesis in the light of modern science. To do this, it 
will be necessary to ask, first, what the author of that 
chapter really teaches us about the origin of nature and 
of man ; to inquire next as to the settled facts of science 
as substantially agreed upon by the best modern author- 
ities in the scientific world ; and then to note the points 
of agreement between the two. 

1. Of the Mosaic record. At the outset it should 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 125 

be very carefully remembered that the methods of 
science and of revelation are entirely different. One 
goes backward, the other forward. One starts with 
facts and asks the cause. The other starts with a great 
First Cause and then speaks of the facts as they proceed 
from his creative hand. In the arithmetics we used to 
study, there were examples in which now one factor and 
now another was wanting. If one was gone, it was 
sought by multiplication ; if the other, the answer was 
sought by division. In like manner the methods of 
science and revelation are exactly opposite. Compare 
them at any point, until the problem is solved, and they 
may not agree. But in the end, when the grand result is 
reached — as it is not yet — the two methods, the reverse 
of each other, like multiplication and division, are 
mutual proofs of the correctness alike of science and of 
religion ; of the book of Nature and the book of God. 
Then, too, the language of the Bible is popular, 
while the language of science claims to be exact. The 
popular language is just as true for its own purposes 
as that of science. It states facts as they appear to 
be. When I say " the sun rises and sets," I speak 
optical, but not scientific truth ; and the man must 
want to quarrel with me who would convict me of false- 
hood because I speak of sunrise and sunset. I could 
not be understood in a popular lecture if I used any other 
phrase, though other terms might be more scientific. 
Moses does the same. Indeed, no other way was pos- 



126 A young man's difficulties with his bible, 

sible. If he had used the scientific terms of Egypt — and 
they were the only scientific terms with which he was 
familiar — they would be false terms to-day. If God had 
inspired him to use our scientific terms, Moses himself 
and all those who have lived during thirty centuries 
could not have understood him. If he had spoken in 
the language of the science of twenty centuries to come, 
his words would have been riddles to us, as well as to 
all former generations. It is not the object of the Bible 
to teach science but religion. Its references to the facts 
which are now called scientific are few, and given only 
in popular language. And the facts are named only in 
their religious bearing. 

In studying this first chapter of Genesis, we must 
not forget that it does not fix any time for the creation 
of the matter out of which the earth was formed. We 
have two verses in which the origin of the substance of 
the earth is named. Moses is careful not to say whether 
the heavens and the earth were created six thousand or 
six million years ago. He says, "In the beginning." 
The time is expressly indefinite. If the geologist can 
show proof that the creation occurred a thousand mil- 
lions of years ago, Moses in the first two verses of 
Genesis does not contradict him. No age or date is 
given. It had a beginning. It was not eternal. It 
had a Creator. God created it. 1 That is all these two 

1 Moses uses a word signifying created in the first verse 
of Genesis. Afterwards as in the fourteenth, he uses another 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 127 

opening verses say about it. What millions of cen- 
turies were passed in chaos before the world was finally 
fitted up for this race of ours in the last six days'* work, 
no man can ever know ; for God has no where told us. 
Nor is this interpretation of the two opening verses of 
Genesis any thing new. Justin Martyr, and Basil, and 
Origen, who were among the fathers of the Christian 
church, over fourteen hundred years ago, gave this in- 
terpretation. All the best modern commentators say 
the same thing. Lange, Stewart, Murphy, Conant arid 
others, all agree that the opening verses of Genesis 
describe the creation of the original matter out of which 
the earth was subsequently through vast convulsions 
fitted up, shaped and formed anew, for the abode of the 
pre-adamite creations, and at length, for man. 

And as the period of chaos is indefinite, so is the 
length of each of these six " day-periods," of Moses. 
It cannot be proved that they were days of twenty-four 
hours each. It is certain that the sun had not shone 
upon the world to make the first of them such days. 
The writer Moses is a prophet. He elsewhere uses the 
term " day,'* just as we do, to describe any period which 
had a beginning and an end. Any limited time in which 
a thing was commenced and finished is " a day." The 
whole six days work in the first chapter is described in 
the second chapter as the work of "one day;" the 

word signifying fashioned or shaped, as out of materials already 
created. 



128 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

writer thus using the word as we do both in the definite 
and the indefinite sense. A Christian pastor said to his 
congregation these words " I bring you as a text for to- 
day the words, ( Behold now is the accepted time : Be- 
hold now is the day of salvation. ' " In one part of the 
sentence the pastor used the word " day," to denote a 
particular Sabbath, a day of twenty-four hours ; in the 
other part of the sentence he used the same word to 
signify a day-period covering now eighteen hundred 
years, and to cover, it may be, centuries more — a day, 
or a period in which God will receive returning sinners 
to salvation. So Moses uses the word " day." When 
he talks of the " tenth day of the month Nisan," we 
know that he means a day of twenty-four hours. When 
he talks of a day of creation we can see that he is not 
so limited. It may cover thousands of years. It is 
of periods in which God began and finished certain 
parts of the creation, that he speaks. 

Nor must we forget that Moses describes creation 
optically, i. e., as it would have appeared to an eye wit- 
ness on the earth. 1 God made these things to pass be- 

1 Is not this also the fair and honest way of interpreting the 
passage about the sun and moon as standing still, which is 
incorporated, evidently from a poetic composition or ode, 
into the Book of Joshua? It is optical language. Says the 
great astronomer Kepler, " The only thing that Joshua prayed 
for was that the mountains might not intercept the sun from 
him. Besides it had been unreasonable to think of astronomy 
or of the errors of sight ; for if any one had told him that 
the sun could not really move in the valley of Ajalon but only in 



DIFFICULTIES FEOM GEOLOGY. 129 

fore him. Some have supposed that he was permitted 
to behold an inspired vision of these creative scenes. 
He describes them as a man would have done had he 
been there. Such a man would have seen the actual 
things exactly as Moses was permitted to see the vision 
of them. In the Midian desert it may be, on six succes- 
sive week days followed by a Sabbath, — each of these 
week-days beginning and closing with "the evening 
and morning," which made the one literal day of 
twenty-four hours — on these literal days, God may have 
allowed the vision of those vast day-periods, in the great 
characteristics of each, to pass before the mind of Moses. 
No human eye saw the actual creation. But Moses is 
to see the vision of it, as if he had been the eye-witness 
of the earth's wondrous changes under the creative hand 
of God. 

And thus the account of creation, declaring as it 
does God's glory, was to be transmitted, through the 
leader of the chosen people, to the entire world. He 

relation to sense, would not Joshua have answered that his one 
wish was to have the day prolonged by any means whatsoever." 
That the Jews understood the language not scientifically, hut 
phenomenally, is also plain from the words of Josephus," That the 
length of the day did then increase is told in the books laid up in 
the temple." The Samaritan copy of Joshua says, " the day was 
prolonged at his prayer." Similarly Dr. Chalmers says, " I accept 
it in the popular sense, having no doubt that to all intents and 
purposes of that day's history, the sun and moon did stand still ; 
the one over Gibeon and the other over Ajalon." To those in the 
conflict it so seemed, and a Hebrew poet put it into verse, and a 
Hebrew historian quotes a stanza of the poem. 

1 



130 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

sees at first the elements, created indeed, but still in 
wildest chaos. There was dim light. It was not sun- 
light but nebulous light. It endured for a time and then 
came darkness. The first day of Moses' vision, corre- 
sponding it may be to the first great day -period of G-od's 
creative work, was ended. Next, the mists are partially 
lifted. The beholder would have seen vast masses of 
cloud, or portions of the firmament above the earth. 
It was the second day. Then comes the dry land, fol- 
lowed by herbage vast and gigantic ; growing, not by 
sunlight, but in the steaming heats of the earth now 
cooled down so far as to allow of plants and trees, which 
were afterwards to be turned into coal for man's use. 
It was the third day. Next, Moses sees for the first 
time the light of the sun shining clearly on the earth. 
That sun might have existed for untold millions of 
years. But through the mists and the murky atmos- 
phere of the world, its rays had never before pierced. 
Now it appears in the heavens, the appointed ruler of 
the day. Then come into view the huge monsters of 
the deep, and the fowls of the air, the vast dynasties of 
the fish, and the beast and the bird. Last of all, at the 
close of the sixth great day-period, comes man, created 
in the image of God. Such is the order in the first 
chapter of Genesis. It is the spectacle of creation as 
vouchsafed to Moses. It was not intended to be scien- 
tific. It was the general order, described by the char- 
acteristic of each great period. Nor is it needed that wo 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 131 

understand each day-period of creation as exactly match- 
ing the prophetic period of the inspired vision. The 
general object is to describe the creation, as it would 
have appeared to an observer had there been one present 
to watch the earth as G-od was preparing it for the 
abode of man. 1 

Turn now from the book of Revelation to the book 
of Nature, and let us ask, next, what does science, and 
especially the science of geology — the science of the 
rocks — say about this same creation. 

Here, too, a few preliminary words are needed. One 
is, that the science of geology is yet in its infancy. It is 
not a hundred years old. Instead of making the bold- 
est assertions of any of the sciences, and so drawing 
down upon itself their condemnation, it should be 
modest. It is also to be remembered that geology has 
changed its fundamental theories again and again. A 
book that was an authority twenty years ago, is no 
authority to-day in geology. The next twenty years 
may witness greater changes. New facts are discovered. 
But new theories are made even faster than new facts 

1 " The seven days are not literal days of twenty-four hours, 
nor yet seven definite historical periods. But as the seven seals, 
vials, trumpets of John's Revelation represented human history 
by a typical representation of each of its grand divisions with- 
out any one of them being chronologically denned, so these 
seven days of Moses represent in a dramatic or typical form the 
changes at creation, each grand feature being boldly sketched 
out in one scenic representation characteristic of that period " 
—Primeval Man Unveiled. 



132 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

are obtained. Xearly every leading geologist has 
abandoned his own most startling theories, and some 
have gone through a dozen of them. Lyell has dis- 
carded his former views about the age of the world, and 
the time of man's appearance on it. Huxley, who had 
claimed millions of years for the earth, under the tell- 
ing blows of Lord Kelvin, easily the first mathematician 
of Europe, has just been compelled to own that the 
claims of geologists about the tremendous age of the 
earth are not proved. It is the same with the age of 
man on the earth. Huxley thinks that as star dust is the 
material out of which the earth was formed, so there is 
a physical basis for all plant, animal and human life. 
Agassiz denounces Darwin's theory of " natural selec- 
tion." And then in turn is denounced by the whole 
scientific world for insisting upon the moral unity of 
the race and yet holding that man sprang not from one 
centre but from several centres — not from one human 
pair but from more than half a dozen human pairs. 1 
The scientists are not agreed in their theories. 

1 Spencer insists that his "theory of force " suffices to account for the 
world and for man. Lamark exalts "variation of species." Darwin 
depends on "natural selection" and " survival of the fittest." Weis- 
man has dealt telling blows at both Lamarkism and Darwinism by 
showing that "all the evidence is against perpetuation by heredity of 
characters acquired by the individual." Cope declares for the " origin 
of the fittest." There are monistic, agnostic, infidel, and Christian 
naturalists. Certainly, Miller, Dana, Le Conte and Dawson are names 
equal to any, and they maintain the theory of one human pair. 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 133 

They agree only on some general facts. What are 
these facts? 

Modern science now almost universally adopts the 
doctrine that the earth was first of all in a fluid, gas- 
eous or nebulous state. This gaseous mass was in- 
tensely heated. Somehow motion was communicated 
to the mass. This brought out heat ; and this heat was 
attended with a feeble light — scientific men call it cos- 
mical light, to distinguish it from sun-light. 1 Thus, 
without intending so to do, the scientists exactly de- 
scribe the first of the Mosaic days of creation. 

Next came, according to modern scientists, the huge 
rocks called Primary, 2 the granites and the different 

1 " How could there be light before the sun ? " So cried Voltaire, and 
a thousand voices have echoed the question. And this objection has 
probably done more to unsettle the minds of young men in past gener- 
ations than any other difficulty of the Bible. Those who believed in 
revelation had no other reply than to ask men to wait. The waiting 
has been richly rewarded. For now no respectably informed man ven- 
tures the question. Humboldt's words about cosmical light are well 
known. He claims the existence of light " which is a similitude of the 
dazzling light of the sun. The existence of this illuminating power we 
discover also among the other orbs." And Proctor, in writing of a late 
solar eclipse says, "We recognize the existence of envelope after envel- 
ope around the sun until our earth is reached and overpast." 

2 Nomenclature has been cast and recast so many times and on so 
many different systems that no one of them may be followed exclu- 
sively. Twenty years ago, naming them according to their supposed 
order of strata, the division of the rocks was into Primary, Secondary 
and Tertiary ; next, with regard to the appearance of life, it was into 
Azoic, Palaeozoic and Mesozoic, etc. Subsequently the nomenclature 
made popular in America by Lyell was employed. But he has himself 



134 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

ingredients of granite. As the boiling mass cooled 
down these became the basis of all the rest. It was 
once almost unanimously maintained that no animal or 
vegetable remains had been found in them. It has, 
however, been recently claimed that there are indica- 
tions of the skeleton of one animal. If so, it is the 
oldest thing that had life. But it is singularly com- 
plex in structure, as it ought not to be on the princi- 
ple of spontaneous life. 

This Primary age was followed by the Secondary or 
Palaeozoic period. "In this appeared," says Sir J. 
W. Dawson, " at once a vast accession of living things 
as if by a sudden production. New forms appear 
which it is impossible to connect genetically with any 
predecessors." New vegetable forms arise in steaming 
air and without sunlight ; then follows the carbonifer- 
ous period, when these vegetable forests were turned 
to coal through some tremendous change by fire and 
water. " There was," says Dawson, " the introduction 
from time to time of new groups, as if to replace 
others." Some of these plants, though appearing so 
early, are more complex, and more perfectly formed, 
and of higher grade, as we study their remains in the 
rocks, than are their successors in our modern world. 

But that age passed. The period of the animal 

reconstructed his- vocabulary, at least as to the Pliocene and Post-plio- 
cene ages. 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 135 

world arrived. Gigantic creatures roamed the earth 
and seas ; in many respects the superiors of their de- 
graded successors as seen in our own age. 

It was a time singularly fruitful of life and equally 
destructive of life. A few years since geologists in- 
sisted, their eyes on the proof of these immense 
changes, that there had been " successive periods of 
the entire destruction and restoration of all life." 
Then, in the swing of the pendulum, it was insisted 
that the progress was uniform and steady from lower 
to more complex organizations in plant and animal 
life. But now the tendency is toward recognizing 
what Mivart, Le Conte, and Dawson call " critical pe- 
riods," and " intermittent creations," and " prolific pe- 
riods." And yet, on the whole, there was progress ; 
the great plan of God taking in, as it did, the destruc- 
tions and reproductions which appear to have been 
sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden. And thus 
the progress was not linear, in straight lines, but by 
a series of circles overlapping each other, like the 
links of a chain. 

Then came another convulsion. 1 The temperature 

1 " In the distant past, not a trace of man's presence has been found. 
He is 'of yesterday.' While the stone volume has preserved for us 
the slight impressions of the Annelid and the foot-trail of perished 
Molluscs in the soft mud over which they crawled ; while it delineated, 
on carboniferous columns, fern-leaves exquisitely delicate in structure 
as the finest species of modern times ; and while the rain-drops of long 



136 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

fell. All the continents were buried beneath the sea. 
Some claim that this was done by sudden and volcanic 
agency ; some, that it occurred by the gradual subsi- 
dence of the land. At this time vast fields, and even 
mountains of ice, were formed over all the face of the 
desolate world. This was followed by the drift pe- 
riod, so called, when, this whole North American conti- 
nent submerged, the great icebergs floated from the 
north-west, dropping from their bases those vast moun- 
tains of gravel and those vast boulders which are found 
all over the continent to-day. Says Humboldt, " the 
Alps were beneath the ocean." Says Lyell, " All land 
has been under water." " The highest mountains," says 
Tenny, "have been the ocean bottom." And then came 
the last great act before man. The continents were 
lifted out of the sea, and the waters gathered into 
the rivers and oceans. And at length on the last of 
these great day-periods man was created. 

Such is substantially the course of creation as our 
scientists now hold it. A few of these points are still 
disputed. But these conclusions are all but universally 
held, and are as certain as any scientific facts can ever 
be. 

bygone ages have left imprints which reveal to us the course which 
even the wind followed ; not a trace of man is visible. Only at the 
close does he appear; science finds him where the Scriptures placed 
him, and sees in him the crown which continuous type had long fore- 
shadowed." — Fraser. 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 137 

A few words, thirdly, as to the general agreement of 
the record in the Bible and the record in the rocks. 

First, all science says that there was originally a 
Creator. Even Darwin, often called an atheist, says, 
•• life was originally breathed by the Creator into a few 
forms or into one." Owen says that " law is only sec- 
ondary cause," but he holds that law is guided by the 
intelligence of the Creator. Herbert Spencer leaves a 
place for God as the author of force. While Agassiz, 
Hitchcock, Dana and Guyot all insist that science no 
less than revelation declares those grandest of words, 
"In the beginning, God!" 

Secondly, all science declares that originally the earth 
was chaotic, sunless ; its vast boiling, surging masses of 
melted rocks, surrounded by clouds of steam and mist, 
were lit at first not by sunlight but by cosmical light. 
Exactly so says Moses. A hundred years ago men 
said, " Moses is surely wrong in not making the sun to 
shine upon the earth until the fourth day." But no 
carefully-read man now makes that objection. The 
huge forests, which now are turned to coal, grew then 
in the steaming atmosphere as they could not have 
grown in the sun's light. Astronomers, geologists and 
chemists all agree that there was light before the di- 
rect rays of the sun touched the earth. How strik- 
ingly is Moses vindicated, or rather God, who spake 
through Moses, in the sacred narrative. 



138 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

"Let there be light" was said on the first day. 
"Let the sun rule the day," was said on the fourth day. 

Thirdly, science declares that the life-periods be- 
came observable only after the formation of the earlier 
rocks. The granites are conspicuous before the veg- 
etable forms in the order of creation. 

Fourthly, science is now insisting that there have 
been successive eras of manifestation or creation. Vast 
forests existed — they were swept away. Vast sea mon- 
sters existed — they have disappeared. Others have been 
introduced and destroyed. No less than twenty-seven 
of these distinct creations and destructions are insisted 
upon by some of our best geologists. 1 Professor Owen 
claims that some species survived these convulsions. 
But Agassiz, and with him the mass of more careful 
scientists, insists upon it that these eras have come and 
gone. He says : " There was a succession of beings on 
the earth's surface. But the fishes of one age are not 
the descendants of those in the former geological age. 
There is no parental descent among them. God has 

1 Geologists long debated the question of steady progress or of sudden 
convulsion as the mode in which these changes came about. The older 
theory made much of immense convulsions ; the newer theory made 
much of the uniformity of advancement. It is coming to be seen that 
both had their place and their play, each more manifest than the other 
at some periods and at some eras. Concerning any special form of a 
development hypothesis, the "wiser and more cautious men, so often 
inclined themselves in former years to stake all on a theory, have 
learned wisdom ; that there is yet " a boundless region to be explored." 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 139 

created all the types of animals that have passed away, 
to introduce man upon our globe." How wondrously is 
this in accordance with the chapter in which God is said 
to have made the fishes and made the birds and made 
the beasts and then made man. 1 

Fifthly, the general order of creation is another re- 
markable fact. The order of the scientists is in out- 
line — we could not expect agreement in detail, for 
science is not yet perfect — is in outline, that of revela- 
tion. There is steady progress from chaos up through 
primary rocks, then on and up through secondary rocks 
with traces of vegetable life ; thence upward still by new 
creations unto the mammal age and then into the highest 
created forms of the mammal age, 2 when man himself 
appears. 

Sixthly, science also teaches of the classification of 
plants according to their " seed " and " kind," or struc- 
ture. The Linnaean system had obtained for years a 
place in the scientific world. But it was felt after all 

1 " There is not an existing stratum in the body of the earth, 
there is not an existing species of plants or animals which can- 
not be traced back to a time when it had no place in the world. 
The forms of organic life had a beginning in time." — Lyell. 

" Species appear suddenly and disappear suddenly." — Agassiz. 

2 The waters were repeopled with beings which were not rep- 
etitions of the forms just exterminated, but original concep- 
tions; and yet not fundamentally different, but united to the old 
by such identity of the fundamental plan as to convince us that 
the intelligence which brought death to all terrestrial existence 
continued to prosecute his own unchanged purpose through all 
succeeding epochs. — Winchell. 



140 



that a classification by flowers was incorrect. And to- 
day the botanists of the world have gone on to their 
new classification, which is only the old classification in 
the first chapter of Genesis. " Let the earth bring forth 
the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree after his kind 
whose seed is in itself." " This new trophy of science/' 
is only an old laurel from the wreath woven so many 
years ago by Moses. 

Seventhly, science puts vegetation before animal life. 
Scripture likewise, in describing the day-periods, places 
the plant kingdom before the animal ; and here again 
the two records agree. 

Eighthly, science puts man as the last of the beings 
that has appeared on the globe. He did not appear un- 
til the close of these tremendous convulsions by which 
the earth was shaped. Eevelation makes man appear 
at the close of the sixth great period. 

But when was that ? When did he appear on our 
earth ? No man can tell us. The Scripture on this 
point is silent. We have no definite chronology in 
Genesis, but only historic periods in their general order. 
Attempts have been made to ascertain the age of man 
from a purely historic basis ; but this method is clearly 
unreliable when taken alone. For the Hebrew method 
and the Samaritan method and the Septuagint method 
are widely divergent. In one, the period from Adam tc 
the flood is sixteen hundred years, in another thirteen 
hundred years, in another it is more than two thou 



DIFFICULTIES FKOM GEOLOGY. 141 

sand years. In the period between Adam and Christ 
they differ by fifteen hundred years. "What wonder 
that we have different systems of chronology by men 
like Ussher, Hales and Poole and Bun sen, none of 
them agreeing in the age of the human race. The 
system . which, until within a single generation, has 
obtained most widely, is that of Ussher, which places 
the creation six thousand years ago. But the Scriptures 
say nothing about six thousand years. And if the time 
of Ussher should even be doubled, there is nothing to 
prevent it in the Mosaic record. The tables of gen- 
ealogy in the Bible were constructed to show the descent 
of Christ from Adam. And the word "generations," is 
plainly used in the older Scriptures with the same in- 
defiuiteness as the word "day " — a usage found also 
in the New Testament, and common also in our own 
century and language. " The extreme uncertainty," 
says Dr. Hodge, " attending all attempts to determine 
the chronology of the Bible, is sufficiently evidenced by 
the fact that one hundred and eighty different calcula- 
tions have been made by Jewish and Christian authors 
of the length of the period between Adam and Christ. 
The longest make it six thousand nine hundred and 
eighty-four years, the shortest three thousand four 
hundred and eighty-three years. If the facts of science 
or of history should ultimately make it necessary tc 
admit that eight or ten thousand years have elapsed 
since the creation of man, there is nothing in the Bible 



142 A YOUKG MAX'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

in the way of such concession. Tlie Scriptures do not 
teach us how long men have existed on the earth" 

It is well known that on the subject of man's age on 
earth the geologists have taken the lead of all other 
scientists in demanding that we extend into an almost 
immeasurable past the time of man's appearance. Wal- 
lace talks of "ten thousand centuries/' and supposes "a 
time when man possessed no powers of speech nor those 
moral feelings which now distinguish the race." Others 
think two hundred thousand years enough. There was 
also much talk about pottery found at the mouth of 
the Nile, which, reckoning in a certain way as to the 
deposits annually made by the river mud, was thought 
to be twelve thousand years old. But since that day, at 
a greater depth, in the same deposit, Sir E. Stephenson 
found a brick bearing on it the stamp of a modern 
ruler of Egypt. And more recently it has been proved 
that the said piece of pottery is of Roman origin. Of 
the so-called fossils at Natchez on the Mississippi, said at 
first to prove man's existence one hundred thousand 
years ago, Sir Charles Lyell, an advocate for the longest 
times, declares, "it is allowable to suspend our judg- 
ment as to its high antiquity." So, too, it is of bones 
in European caves, and of Swiss dwellings submerged 
in lakes, and of arrow heads and flint hatchets which 
have been found mixed with bones of extinct species of 
animals, and with human bones. Lyell says, they " were* 
probably not coeval." And some of the most eminent 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 143 

geologists declare, in the words of one of them, " It 
cannot be proved that these remains may not have been 
washed up, drifted and reassorted from earlier deposits 
dating back at the utmost but a few thousand years." 

It is the same with the immense age claimed for the 
Egyptian Pyramids and other monuments — viz., seven- 
teen thousand years before Christ. Eecent discoveries 
have effectually banished the old illusions. Champollion 
declares " no Egyptian monument is really older than 
two thousand two hundred years before Christ." Wil- 
kinson decides that " Egypt has nothing older than a 
century or so before Abraham's day." 

But if geologists have demanded immense periods 
for the past history of the race, and have been followed 
by a few orientalists, their claims have been disputed 
strenuously by another class of scientists. Astronomers, 
with Sir W. Thompson at their head, while desiring to 
extend the period further than Ussher and the mere 
historians, have dealt severe blows at the geologists ; for 
they have proved that, not many thousand years ago, such 
was the temperature of the earth, that man could not 
have lived upon it. It is then a settled thing that the 
sciences cannot determine accurately the period of the 
advent of man on earth. 

The historians generally favor the shorter, the geol- 
ogists the longer, and the astronomers the middle 
ground. The general drift, however, of scientific and phi- 
losophic thought inclines to the extension of the period 



144 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

of man's existence by a few thousand years. If the 
development theory should at length be shown to have 
a scientific basis, if even that particular form of it which 
is called the Darwinian theory should be accepted — a 
theory less brilliant and less popular than that of the 
" vestiges," which it supplanted, only in turn, as we 
believe, like it to sink out of sight — it would not be 
necessary to reconstruct a single verse of Genesis. If 
more than one physical origin for man is ever proved, 
nothing in the Bible can be alleged against it. Moral 
unity for our race is all that is really required. The 
doctrine of " diverse origins for man," was defended by 
a theologian on theological grounds and as a necessity 
of interpretation more than two hundred years ago. If 
it should ever be proved that, before Adam, there were 
creatures having man's physical form, and that at 
length it pleased God, in Eden, to take this being, 
whose body centuries before had been " formed out of 
the dust of the earth," and, then and there, to breathe 
into him a higher kind of life in which he became en- 
dowed with new capacities for moral character, with a 
new sense of right and wrong, with an immortal and 
responsible soul — all this would not be in any necessary 
conflict with the Scripture story. For nothing is said 
as to how long a time elapsed between the formation of 
man as a creature of mere body with an animal life in 
it, and the subsequent inbreathing of a responsible and 
immortal spirit by which the race became what we see 



DIFFICULTIES FROM GEOLOGY. 145 

it to-day. It would, in that case, be just as true that 
" God hath made of one blood all nations of men for 
to dwell on the face of the earth ; " just as true "that by 
one man sin entered into the world and death by sin." 
In that case, the moral unity of the race, taught 
as a historical fact by Moses, and by Christ, and also 
incorporated doctrinally with the teaching of Paul, 
could be held and defended just as firmly, though on 
other grounds, as Christians hold and defend this fact 
and this doctrine to-day. 

Indeed, in so recent and authoritative a work as 
Lange on Genesis, we have a note of the translator 
which reads thus : "this does not exclude the idea that 
the human physical was connected with the previous 
nature or natures, and was brought out of them ; that is, 
that it was ( made of the earth,' in the widest signifi- 
cation of the term ; he having an earthly as well as a 
heavenly origin." Without adopting any one of these 
theories, nay more, holding that the time is not ripe nor 
the evidence all in for a careful verdict about any one 
of them, a Christian may rejoice that no truth will ever 
displace that of the Scripture record ; that, positive as 
to some statements, the Bible is purposely left elastic and 
uncommitted about many a minor question. The agree- 
ment is clear of the two records as to a Creator, and as 
to one race. Equally clear is the statement that only 
i few thousand years since man did not exist, and as to 
that other fact, that the time will come when this earth 

K 



146 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

will be no longer his abode. Says Sir W. Thompson . 
" Within a finite period the earth must have been, and 
within a finite period to come the earth must again be, 
unfit for the habitation of man. There is a process of 
events toward a state infinitely different from the 
present." Who can fail to recall, in listening to such 
testimony from scientific lips, those words of the Scrip- 
tures, " The elements shall melt, and the earth also 
and the works that are therein shall be burned up." 
" Heaven and earth shall pass away." 

Science, again, declares that men are a race. This 
is regarded as proven by bodily structure, by human 
language, and by mental and moral likeness. Says 
Owen : " Men form one species, and differences are but 
indicative of varieties." Max Miiller declares " language 
has one common source." And above all other proofs 
is that of mental and moral science ; showing as it doe*- 
the capacity of man, and man alone, for faith ; th*. 
ability for moral ideas ; the powers for knowing God 
and duty ; for loving the pure and seeking the heavenly. 
For, no matter what theory of man's origin be adopted, 
this at least all grant, that man's soul to-day is not 
an ape soul, or a swine soul, but a human soul — a soul 
capable of faith in the unseen, capable of love to God 
as " our Father in heaven." And here Scripture comes 
in, declaring that " through faith" — faith in testimony 
being a human characteristic — " we understand that the 
worlds were made," and that " God hath made of one 



DIFFICULTIES FKOM GEOLOGY. 147 

blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the 
earth." 

And thus young men are taught to hold fast i i their 
confidence in the Bible. Scientific theories for \ time 
may oppose the statements of it. A fact here anv there 
may as yet appear strange. Wait a little. Let th> men 
who run their theories against Biblical facts have time 
enough, and they will be compelled to alter their the; Ties. 
The settled facts are so many illustrations of Scrij- ture 
truth. Let no man be afraid of Scripture ; no more let 
him be afraid of science. God's handwriting is never 
contradicting when truly read. 

And we can also see that we have each our aty as 
members of the race of men out of which Christ came. 
Adam has sinned. The taint comes on us. We mherit 
it, as we do diseased bodies ; as we do the liability to 
physical death. But after all we are voluntary in yield- 
ing to any sin ; for any sin is a sin " after the simili- 
tude of Adam's transgression." And so we are respon- 
sible for being sinners before God. But as we receive 
taint from Adam through the race bond, so we re 
ceive gracious offers through Christ, the second Adam, 
Here, too, it is our voluntary act to believe, and to 
accept the Holy Spirit, whereby we are recreated in the 
image of God. Paradise can be regained. The race- 
bond in Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. 

We are prepared, by the thoughts already presented, 
to welcome the Scriptural idea of the " new heavens, and 



148 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." Vast have 
been the convulsions of the old earth both through flood 
and fire. But the floods shall come no more. The next 
great convulsion is to be, according to God's word, by 
fire. The earth and the things in it are to be burned 
up. Then every mark of man's sin shall be obliterated. 
Every trace of evil shall be destroyed. And the puri- 
fied earth is to be visited by a higher form of life than 
ever before. Steadily has the earth gone on. Fit only 
for coarser and lower forms of life in the old geologic 
six day-periods, it has been now for a few years the 
home of sinful man. Beyond the great day of God, it 
shall be reformed and remodeled, and become the spot 
that holy souls from heaven shall love to visit. Thank 
God that the old world — now the type of hollowness 
and deceit, so that worldliness is another name for sin- 
fulness — is to be so changed as to become an outlying 
borderland of God's holy heaven ! 



CHAPTER VI. 

Difficulties from Astronomy. 

A young man states to the writer his belief as fol- 
lows. " I believe in a God who has a general superin- 
tendence over the affairs of the world. I believe in the 
immortality of the human soul. I believe that what a 
man does here affects generally his condition after 
death. Any thing farther than this I doubt." 

Urged to tell why he doubted, the reply was that, 
substantially, of thousands. " God seems too great to 
concern himself minutely about our human affairs. It is 
too much to believe that he who has the care of the 
whole universe will condescend to notice all the thoughts 
of a being so insignificant to him as a single and separate 
man : too much to believe that he will hear him pray 
and do any thing because he prays that he would not 
have done just as soon if the man had kept silent : too 
much to believe that this infinite God had such a care 
for this world — a mere dot among the starry worlds, 
a mere grain of sand in a corner of his universe — as to 
give his Son to die for those dwelling upon it, whole 
nations of whom are but as the invisible dust in the 
balance." 



150 A YOUNG MAtf'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

And when this argument is pressed at night and out 
under the vast canopy of the winter heavens, with un- 
numbered worlds in view, and when it is remembered 
that new telescopes and larger glasses are multiplying 
these worlds, each as worthy, so far as we can see, to be 
visited by a Saviour, each as worthy of the divine care 
and providence as our world, the impression, to some 
minds, grows stronger, that we must not be too definite 
in our belief about the minute care and providence of 
God. " Is not a man's creed best when it is briefest ; 
when he ventures only on a mere outline belief as to 
God, the soul and the future life ? " So say some. 
Others feel it. And they hold to Christianity but 
loosely, because of the starry worlds, and the planetary 
spaces and the vastness of the universe. 

It is believed that these doubts are without founda- 
tion ; that the vastness of the universe confirms faith 
rather than suggests doubts, when carefully considered ; 
that, since God is no where general in ordering the stars 
but every where special in the realms of astronomy, the 
inference is in favor not of a general and outline creed, 
but of a special and distinct and Christian belief. 
David's song, " When I consider thy heavens, the work 
of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast 
ordained ; What is man, that thou art mindful of him ? 
and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? " was not 
the minor strain of doubt, but the song of holy wonder 



DIFFICULTIES FROM ASTEOKOMT. 151 

and thankful praise. Others might doubt ; but he must 
believe and adore and pray. 

Look at the minuteness of the arrangements in the 
starry sky. The first impression is vastness. World 
upon world, sun upon sun, system upon system, crowd 
each other to the very verge of space. But where is 
the verge of space ? Through the best telescopes, 
counting a little patch of worlds in the distant star 
dust where they are sown with only average thick- 
ness on the sky, and then multiplying the whole 
horizon by that star patch, astronomers count billions 
of stars. And when larger tubes shall be pointed 
against the sky, it is believed that the number now 
known will be but a mere fraction of those then to be 
seen. Figures get to be meaningless as we try to number 
the stars. The universe is immensity. Think, too, of 
the spaces through which these worlds are distributed. 
Our world spins its annual round of two hundred mil- 
lion miles, and never gets within thirty million miles of 
a neighbor star. Our sun has for its nearest neighbor 
sun a star forty-six million miles away. And if this is 
nearness in the skies, what is distance ? Looking 
only on this vastness we are abashed and confounded ; 
and we are almost ready to say that God's care can be 
nothing beyond general over the worlds, and especially 
over man the minute insect here in a mere outpost of 
the universe. But then, this temporary feeling yields 
in a single moment to our firmer and calmer reason. 



152 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

For surely all this immensity tells of an infinite God. 
It is exactly what might be expected of him. It scatters 
atheism, driving it beyond the stars. There must be a 
God of immensity, when the universe, the work of his 
hands, is so immense. 

Now mark the fact that this God of immensity is 
great in the minuteness of his arrangements. These 
planets are racing through the sky at the rate of thou- 
sands of miles each moment. But see how carefully 
God keeps time on this race course. Jupiter never gets 
in at his goal at any given point, a moment too late or 
a moment too soon. One mistake of a second here, 
would wrench the system past all computation. The 
most unwieldy of the stars comes exactly to time. 
Turning from the evening sky the astronomer said, 
" God is a mathematician." And as the motions are 
exact, and timed to the millionth of a second, so the 
masses are arranged and guarded with the minutest 
care. God stands with scales more exact than those of 
the goldsmith, and weighs out to each planet its grains 
of sand, never one too many to Jupiter or one too few 
to Uranus. A handful of dust in the wrong place 
would upset the machinery of the heavens. God is 
minute as well as vast in his universe. If his lines and 
angles stretch across the universe, the measurement is 
exact. Nothing is simply and only general. Every 
thing is carefully poised and specially considered. God 
has its vastness, because he has the minuteness of the 



DIFFICULTIES FROM ASTRONOMY. 153 

universe in his hand. What, then, is the religious in- 
ference from these heavens ? Is it that God is simply a 
general God, who has made only the cast-iron frame of 
the machinery, and has left the exact fitting of each 
cog of every wheel pretty much to itself ; that he is to be 
believed in as having only & general care for mankind, who 
in turn are to have only a general faith in his existence, 
a general idea of religious duties, which duties are 
only the general doing of things that are about right ? 
Nay ! Nay ! Is not the inference in favor of the special 
belief in a God ever near, who hears prayer, who has 
cared for man, and who reveals the moral glory of his 
grace in Jesus Christ even as the glory of wisdom and 
power are displayed in these radiant worlds above us. 
The stars do not say Christ. But they tell of a minute- 
ness of God's care for worlds, that is exactly matched 
in God's care for the souls of men. 

The young man whose doubt I am discussing argued 
in a very similar style from the revelations of the mi- 
croscope. And since the reasoning — that from the im- 
mensity of minute things, as in astronomy from the im- 
mensity of great things — is very similar, the answer to 
it is found in the same line of thought. 

The microscope is simply the inverted telescope. 
That looked among the mighty orbs, this looks down on 
the minutest things which God has made. It discovers 
insects so small that twenty-seven millions of them 
would make but a single inch. It finds vast families of 



154 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

various kinds of them in the cavities of a common grain 
of sand. In each drop of stagnant water is a world of 
animate beings who have as much room in proportion to 
their size as have the whales in the Pacific ocean. In a 
single leaf it finds swarms of insect life grazing as cattle 
on a hill-side. It finds a down on the butterfly's wing 
every fringe of which is so exact, that human art in its 
nicest and evenest productions is only clumsy and bun- 
gling. God has finished off and elaborated the wing of 
an insect that lives only a single day. Surely no man 
can doubt God's minuteness in his care for man, after 
seeing through the microscope, what he does for beings 
lower than man. If the telescope humbles us, when we 
invert it in the microscope it exalts us. Little in one 
view, we are large in the other. Shall God care for the 
polish on the beetle's wing and have no care for an im- 
mortal soul ? Doing nothing slightly, but all things 
well in nature, has he no concern for the greater as well 
as for the lesser things of man's life ? I can better 
understand Christ's splendid example of a special provi- 
dence in the numbering of a hair and the falling of a 
sparrow, when I see what God does down among the 
living insect world as the microscope reveals his handy 
work. 

Then, too, when we think of the myriad races lower 
than ourselves, is man quite so contemptible a being ? 
Compared with God, man is feeble. But compared 
with the insect, he is almost a God. His world is small 



DIFFICULTIES FEOM ASTKOKOMT. 155 

among the starry worlds, but it is vast as compared with 
the world of the insects that live in a sand grain. If 
God has guided the instinct of those minute beings so 
that each does his appropriate work, will he refuse to 
hear a man's earnest prayer for guidance in doing a 
work that involves the eternal interest of a priceless 
soul ? If he has cared so much for their bodies that 
they may be saved to fulfil their destiny, will he have no 
plan of salvation for man's soul, that the highest and 
noblest being that walks the earth may not through 
sin be utterly ruined ? 

Then, too, these manifestations of God in nature, so 
far from awaking doubt, prepare us to believe in his 
manifestation in humanity. In the midnight sky he 
reveals his skill and his power. He does not launch 
worlds into space as boys throw their snow balls into 
the air from the mere feeling of sport, and the exuber- 
ance of power. He has the motive of revealing before 
intelligent beings his wisdom and his might. But why 
stop there ? Why skill and might displayed, and all 
else hidden ? Ah ; but mere things will not show the 
deeper perfections of God. Yet being God, he must 
desire to display these movings and motions of his heart. 
He can only do this to man through man. Yet a mere 
man cannot show it. He himself must then be incar- 
nate in man, God manifest in flesh. Grant me this 
only, that the worlds of the midnight sky were not 
made in sport ; that their maker God, desired to reveal 



156 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

himself in these, that only a part of his nature could 
shine in them, while he himself could be enshrined in 
man, his image — and the inference is clear that he may, 
that he probably will come among us as Immanuel, ' f God 
with us." The stars do not hinder me, as I study them : 
they help me to believe that, manifesting his glory 
and power in them, he will also manifest himself in a 
human form. They prepare me to accept the great 
fact that Jesus is the God-man — who came to show us 
the beating of his heart even as these stars show us the 
working of his hands. 

Again ; turning from the works themselves to the 
attributes of God as indicated by them, doubt is lessened 
rather than increased. "He is so great that he has 
greater things to do than to notice each man," says the 
objector. But is that the true inference from the fact ? 
Why not state it thus : He is so great, that, doing all 
things else, he can also notice each man. He is great 
at condescension. He is great in providing for the 
things that men would call trifles. In this universe the 
smallest things are the hinges on which turn the gravest 
events. Any trivial thing not carefully worked, the 
least accident in a trifle, may unhinge every broadest 
plan. An insect of an hour may inflict a fatal sting 
upon an emperor ; and his death may destroy a nation 
and change the map of a continent. A God every where 
or a God nowhere is the alternative. He must have 
every event in his control, or he will loose the reins, and 



DIFFICULTIES FEOM ASTKONOMY. 157 

cannot govern his world. He must, then, care for man. 
And if he have any care, it must extend eyen to man's 
thoughts ; for these are the sources of his acts. And so 
because he is God and therefore cannot be ignorant even 
if he would about any minutest thing, and because if 
ignorant of the lesser, he could not govern the greater, 
we feel sure of the Christian doctrine which teaches 
that God is near man, watches every deed, marks 
every purpose, and will bring every thought into 
judgment whether it be good or whether it be evil. 
Surely there is no general care for man that is not 
first special, no general providence that is not parti- 
cular ; no superintendence for the whole earth, that does 
not take in every particle of its dust ; no watchfulness 
over any man's soul which does not include the minut- 
est things that touch his mortal and his immortal life. 

And as we reason from God's works in the starry 
skies to his nature, and to the manifestations of him- 
self he will be likely to exhibit on other fields, so we 
reason from man and from his capacities for understand- 
ing something of the divine ways and works. The stars 
are mere masses of matter. They do not know them- 
selves. They do not know God. They do not know 
man. But man knows them ; and looking on them can 
thank God for them. They have no likeness to God. 
God is their Creator, not their Father. God is Father 
only to souls. Shall he have such interest in those stars 
that know not any thing, and only a general outline care 



158 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

for a human soul, which alone can know of his 
works ? Is there no evidence that God loves to be ap- 
preciated in his world ? Did he not make man his 
highest work to understand and interpret the other 
works of his hands ? One soul is worth more than all 
the stars of the skies. Those stars are burning out. 
Year by year astronomers discover a star on fire. It 
burns on its months and then vanishes — a token of 
what God says is to be done with our earth at the 
final day. 

But souls do not cease to be. They have an immor- 
tality. God has done so much in endowing them 
already, that we should be surprised if he did not do 
more. We have seen why he who reveals his power 
and glory in the stars, should also reveal himself in 
humanity ; why God should manifest himself in Jesus 
Christ. But this spiritual nature of man carries us 
further. The great thing about a man is not his avoir- 
dupois. The mind makes the man ; the soul stamps 
him as of worth. Shall God reveal his thought in the 
stars, and shall he refrain from revealing it likewise in 
man's realm of thought i. e. the literature of the world? 
Shall men reveal their thought in books ; and shall 
God have no Book ? Shall his thought shine in every 
department except that where man's thoughts shine 
brightest ? Is it not of all things most reasonable ; nay 
so reasonable as to be absolutely certain, that God will 
reveal himself in a book, a Bible, a revelation in human 



DIFFICULTIES FKOM ASTKCWOMY. 159 

thought and language about himself. There must be a 
Bible, a book of God, given through men, and having a 
divine inspiration, as all the great works of human 
genius have a human inspiration in them. 

A few years ago astronomers said that there were 
strange perturbations in the motions of certain planets 
What was the trouble ? Some one suggested that if a 
planet existed between two of those already known it 
would account for the disturbance. The disturbance 
was carefully calculated and the position of the supposed 
planet ascertained, and when they pointed the iron 
tube at the spot, there stood the waiting star. There 
was need for it ; and so the star itself was there. 

I reason in the spiritual astronomy of religion in the 
same way. I find a deep want. Here is a God whose 
notice of me is exact and minute. He will require 
of me a strict account at the last day. But I cannot 
do the duties of this life without some knowledge of the 
life to come. If that life takes on any complexion from 
this, I must in some way know about that coming life. 
No one but the eternal God can tell me certainly about 
that future world, what it is ; how to escape its terrors, 
if it has terrors ; how to gain its joys, if it has joys. I 
must have, not the inspiration of human genius, but the 
divine inspiration of God's thought in my human lan- 
guage ; in other words I must have an inspired Bible to 
teach me of the future and so of the present. If I do 
not know about that life, I cannot in this world get 



160 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

ready for the future. I do not go upon the journey of a 
week without preparing for it. Can I go the eternal 
journey without making any special preparation in this 
life ? How can I know in what way to prepare for a 
journey so solemn, and on which I may start so sud- 
denly ? If there be a God with any care for me, he 
will tell me. He will not leave me to be tossed on the 
ocean of human guesses. He will give me my directions 
and instructions. And so I reason with heart and head 
that there must be a Bible ; just as, to those astron- 
omers there must be a star. The need of it is the 
proof of it. 

We may go further. Man has deeper needs than 
those requiring direction. He needs redemption from 
the guilt and bondage of sin. The stars are guided in 
their courses by one whose skill provides for every inch 
of their course and every second of their time. Their 
every want is supplied. A thousand influences would 
draw each of them from its orbit. But God provides 
for them that they dash not off their track to ruin. 
Unlike them, we can and do turn away from our ap- 
pointed duty. But shall we think that the God who 
would rescue a star from its ruin, could look on and see 
men lost in sin, and make no effort at their salvation ? 
I see him give Jesus Christ. I see Jesus Christ dying, 
the just for the unjust, that we may be saved. And I feel 
that he who cares so closely for the stars in their orbits, 
and who holds them to their course, is doing all this 



DIFFICULTIES FKOM ASTRONOMY. 161 

work of redemption for man, his child, the being with 
an immortal soul — doing it because it is like him to do 
it ; like him here to show his heart, as there in the sky 
to show the wonders of his hand. 

In short, I am compelled to feel that he who has so 
garnished the evening sky, so carefully settled the paths 
of the stars, so timed each planet, and weighed to a 
grain of sand each orb, who is never general but always 
special in his care for every thing great and for every 
thing small, is a God who has not left me any poor gen- 
eral outline creed in the infinite matter of religion. He 
is — thanks be to his name, as becomes him, and as be- 
comes mau, his child — especially careful and exact, espe- 
cially full and explicit in telling me what to believe and 
what to do in religion, and how to gain a holy heaven. 
The stars do not make me doubt. They help my faith. 
They intimate, they more than intimate a Bible which 
teaches me all I need to know. 

Thank God that we are not left to any man's guesses 
in religion. I ask you, young men, to come to no uncer- 
tain science in this matter of religion. God is our au- 
thority here. The clear doctrines of his Word shine out 
in the moral as do these stars in the natural firmament. 
Nay, these stars are only for the eye. But God's 
truth is for the soul. We can prove it to the intellect. 
That is well. But, young men, the God of those 
heavens and of this Bible, asks your hearts. He has 
worlds enough. But he wants appreciative and loving 

L 



162 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

souls. He stamped its radiant glory upon these over- 
hanging heavens. The vast spaces of the ether blue 
were the groundwork on which he wrought out the 
pattern, so brilliant, so gorgeous, for the gaze of the 
worlds. He has another firmament, higher, grander 
than this of the evening sky. Souls are the stars stud- 
ding that firmament. They have a peculiar lustre. Com- 
ing into existence at first, as the world was created, in 
chaos, the Spirit of God, which changed that old earth- 
chaos into the orderly and beautiful world where we 
dwell, has called these souls " out of nature's dark- 
ness into his marvellous light." They are destined for 
the higher firmament of heaven. They are to be at 
length stars, not for man's gaze, as are these evening 
orbs ; but they are for God's delight, for the garniture 
of his own heaven. 

God wants hearts. He can take the weakest and 
most guilty, if it be freely given to him, and out of it 
he can make an orb the radiance of which shall shine 
when these "heavens are rolled together as a scroll and 
the elements shall melt with the fervent heat." 



CHAPTER VII. 

Difficulties about Historic Facts. 

Visitors at the White Mountains are taken to see 
that great natural curiosity which is known as the "Old 
Man of the Mountain/' or " The Profile." On the 
front of a lofty cliff, hundreds of feet above him, the 
traveller is shown a great stone face with its gigantic 
features sharply cut against the morning or the evening 
sky. But the perfection of the resemblance is discerned 
only when the spectator takes his stand on a specified 
spot Seen half a mile in either direction nothing is 
visible on the mountain side save a rugged mass of unin- 
teresting rock. Everything depends upon the right 
approach and the correct position of the man himself as 
he comes to the study of this great natural wonder. 
What if it be the same with other things ; with wonders 
in the moral as well as in the physical world ? What if 
it be a very especial need when a young man comes to 
his Bible, that he should approach it in a peculiar way 
and occupy a certain definite position. 

We have seen that the book which we call the Bible 
is a peculiar book ; that its claims are unlike any other 
volume in existence ; that it is a great moral wonder. 



Is it then out of analogy that it should demand a pecu 
liar mood of mind, a certain suitable state of intellect 
and heart, in those who approach it ? The poetic mood 
is needed for the poem. The philosophic mood is 
needed for the study of the volume on philosophy. 
The scientist claims that a peculiarly calm and patient 
mood is needed by him who would come aright to the great 
problems of science ; that, not the poetic spirit, nor the 
philosophic spirit, nor yet the theologic spirit, can be 
any substitute for this mood. And he is right. By all 
means, the scientific spirit for the scientific problem. 
So, too, the philosopher, devoted to the broadest in- 
quiries, insists that there can be no substitute for the 
philosophic spirit, if one would study the volumes of 
Leibnitz or Descartes, of Hamilton or Hickock. And 
lie is right. Are we then out of analogy when we insist 
that here, in the study of the great moral problems of 
the Bible, there is needed a definite mood, a certain 
reverent and devout tone of mind ; and that neither the 
scientific or the philosophic spirit can be substituted for 
this obvious and necessary requirement. Everything 
depends upon the position of the beholder in looking up 
to this great moral wonder of a Divine Eevelation. For 
the Bible is not made for the scientist as such, nor for 
the philosopher or poet as such, but for them all as men 
with moral wants, and for all other men, young and old, 
as moral beings. For it is not our scientific or philo- 
sophical capacities, but our moral capacities that are to 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 165 

be awake and receptive as we come to the Book the 
grand object of which is moral teaching. 

And yet, I can understand how it is that exceedingly 
shrewd men, overlooking this very necessary condition, 
should make such sad work when they come to the more 
wonderful facts of the Scriptures. They are puzzled, 
confounded and led on to infidelity by their wrong ways 
of approaching these things. They would come to 
"the feeding of the five thousand," or to any other 
miracle of the Bible, just as they would come to any 
alleged fact on the purely natural plane of common 
things. But that miracle does not profess to be a 
common fact, nor to have been wrought down in the 
plane of nature. It refuses to be questioned by the 
agriculturist, by the chemist, or by any man either 
of vulgar or of learned curiosity. It was not wrought for 
wonder-seekers. It declines to let the philosopher talk 
to it of "laws of nature," and of fixed principles. It 
is its own principle. It is a physical fact with a moral 
meaning, and coming in under moral laws, in a system 
higher than nature. It is a moral doctrine incarnate in 
a physical fact. No man has any right to consider it out 
of moral connections. It is to be studied only in its re- 
lations to the Christ who performed it, to the time when 
it occurred, to the place it filled, to the truth it taught, 
to its bearing on the development of the Messiah's plan 
and aim, and above all, to the niche it was to fill in the 
great temple which God through Christ was building 



166 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

for the reverent worship of reverent men. To put these 
moral connections aside and out of sight; in judging of 
"the feeding of the five thousand," is to ignore all the 
reasons that made the miracle a possibility, and all the 
conditions furnished by its author to us for our investi- 
gation of the meaning the character and the reality of 
the event itself. There are men who come as scientists 
with a profound reverence for "nature," and little for 
God, ready to refer any thing to it, but receiving the 
suggestion to refer any thing to him with the shrug of 
impatient and irreverent unbelief. And these men, in 
this mood, would apply their methods to the miracles of 
the Bible ! Nothing can be more absurd, unless it be 
the proposition of those who with a confusion of terms 
which would be amusing if the theme were not so seri- 
ous, propose to ascertain "the scientific value of 
prayer ; " as if anybody ever thought it had a scientific 
value ; as if any Christian thinker had ever dreamed of 
measuring moral values by physical standards ; as if one 
could ask of his grocer a bushel of right or a peck of wrong, 
of his tailor a yard of truth or of error, or leave with 
his apothecary an order for the chemical analysis of a 
man's love for his child and the likelihood of a father to 
grant his child's petition ! Christianity requires tests. 
Men are " to prove all things." But it suggests there 
is a proper way to do it. It says, put your crucible and 
scalpel where they belong in nature. Study your laws 
whether of the physical world or of the mental world, 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 167 

in the obvious and appropriate ways that are open to 
you. And when you come to religious facts come also 
in appropriate ways, and seek moral truth by moral 
methods. We object to the claim of any set of men, 
that we are to take their methods, excellent elsewhere, 
in the study of the miracles. For the miracles are not 
mere phenomena, mere freaks of power for vulgar curi- 
osity or for scientific and philosophic inquiry. They 
are parts of a mighty moral system. And they are not 
to be approached except from this point of advance. 
They are to be studied with reference to moral ends ; and 
this neither the scientist nor the philosopher, as such, pro- 
poses to do. The miracles are for man as a moral being. 
And the same is true of many an incident of the 
Old and New Testament which is not miraculous, but 
which nevertheless is very strange, and it may be almost 
absurd when seen alone. But when studied in its place 
and seen as an object-lesson of God for the moral teach- 
ing of men, it becomes not only credible but instructive ; 
not only probable but morally certain, as an event 
needed for its moral impression at the very point of 
time, at the very place, and in the very circumstances 
described. So that if there had not been some such 
event occurring in the process of the divine tuition of 
the race, we should have wondered more than we won- 
der now ; the absence of such events being more remark- 
able than their presence in human history. Considered 
simply as a method of healing human bodies how absurd 



the "raising of the serpent in the wilderness." But 
seen in the setting of the story, seen as God meant it to 
be seen, as a teaching and a prophecy of Christ's uplift- 
ing on the cross ; seen as a renewing of the primal 
promise given after the primal sin ; as the palpable 
objective demonstration of the great moral fact of an 
atoner and an atonement ; seen as a lesson set to the 
whole world as to the place and the value of faith, the in- 
cident is not only redeemed from littleness, but it shines 
in such grandeur that its light is thrown across all the 
separating centuries. The entire language of the reli- 
gious world has been colored thereby, and men every- 
where have been led to associate the idea of the lifting 
up of Christ with the lifting up of the brazen serpent. 
Nay ; the Great Teacher himself has interpreted for us 
the prophecy, has explained the object-lesson of God. 
He has said, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the 
wilderness even so must the son of man be lifted up that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have 
eternal life." 

I would have every young man who approaches the 
Bible come to it with the true idea of God's method oj 
revelation in his mind. For this is the key to the 
volume. That method is easily gathered from even a 
general perusaL God's method is to reveal himself to 
mankind through a particular race, the Hebrews ; and 
this revelation, he will have to culminate in a particular 
person, Jesus Christ. 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 169 

The Hebrew race were fitted to become the medium 
of this revelation by certain peculiarities. 

One of these peculiarities was their capacity for moral 
ideas. True of all Oriental as compared with the Occi- 
dental nations, this capacity to receive and express such 
truths was pre-eminently a Hebrew trait. They were 
quick beyond any nation of the olden time, in what may 
be called religious receptivity. They were spiritual sym- 
bolists. They thought in figures and talked in meta- 
phors. They went down naturally to the spiritual base of 
things. It was not poetry, but religious instinct and 
the moral insight which made them see in all things the 
broad shadow of God's thoughts. They saw him every- 
where. And he was uttering to them spiritual truths 
where others saw nothing but bald bare physical facts. 
To the Hebrew mind material things were shadowy and 
fleeting ; their main use being to remind man of the 
spiritual world so near, so potent, so helpful. This 
physical world was the world of the dying ; the other 
world, overshadowing this, was the world of the living. 
The real world was the world of God and angels and 
souls, of love and of hate, of duty and of destiny ; of 
heaven and of hell. Outward things were just the 
images seen in a mirror — not the realities, but only re- 
presentations of the realities. And so every thing in 
Palestine was a shadow, a type, a semblance, a prophecy 
of some moral fact ; a representation of some deep reli- 
gious idea. Each object was bursting with moral mean- 



170 A TOUKG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

mgs, and the whole world was alive with God's thoughts 
revealed unto man through temporal objects. 

This religious idealism shows itself in all the Old 
Testament story. The Biblical history is unlike every 
other on this very account. Says Stanley: "Every 
incident and every word of a narrative is fraught with a 
double meaning, and earthly and spiritual things are 
put over against each other — hardly to be seen in the 
English version, but in the original clearly intended." 
Take the promise on the strength of which the He- 
brews went out of Egypt and became a nation. It 
reads, literally rendered, that they should come to " a 
land of rest." To us there would be just this meaning ; 
that after being vexed in slavery, they should come to a 
land where there was no task-master. But that was the 
very least of all the things which it meant to them. 
The physical was the mere alphabet for the spiritual 
idea. So to a child the mere letters of the word " men," 
take the attention. He says to himself that the first 
letter has three lines with curves and so it is " m ; " that 
the letter curved at the top is " e ; " and the last with 
two lines and curves in it is ' ' n ; " and that all together 
they spell the word " men." But a full grown man see- 
ing that word on the page, does not stop upon the let- 
ters as letters ; still less upon the word as a word. 
There is a thought in it for him. He grasps at once the idea 
of a broad race of mankind with unity in their diversity, 
with their social, their political, their moral relations. 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 171 

The ancient Hebrew went through no lengthened 
process of logical deduction. No idea had he of reason- 
ing by analogy. He did the thing instinctively. He 
did not set up the outward object and extract labori- 
ously the metaphor, and then mechanically apply it to 
moral truths. To him the two were one. If either 
led it was the spiritual. ' And when Moses gave the 
promise of " a land of rest," every Hebrew mind went 
backward to " God's rest," at the close of creation, and 
took up the idea of " Sabbath rest," that is of heaven 
itself, the serene abode of God. Nor backward only, 
but forward the word carried every one of them. 
" Rest," was not to them simply a state of bodily repose. 
The word was broad enough to denote God's smile, 
favor, blessing, in every form of political and spiritual 
enjoyment. It meant to them the best of earth and the 
best of heaven. They seized on the moral idea of the 
physical fact. And this was their great characteristic 

1 In this fact may be found the removal of a difficulty which 
some have felt as to " Solomon's Song." It has seemed to them 
too sensuous, as it sets forth the ecstasy of religious feeling 
under the allegory of a bride and a bridegroom. It may be too 
warm for our cooler occidental tastes. But the Bible is for the 
Eastern as well as the Western nations. A distinguished Eng- 
lish orientalist has declared that, whereas once the book of 
" Solomon's Song," was to him a great trial on ground above 
named, his residence in the East, and his notice of the fact that 
the religious ideas of the people found constant expression 
through nuptial figures, had removed from his mind all hie 
former feeling. 



as a race, and the leading element of that national 
feeling which fitted them to be a peculiar people. 

And here is the answer to the question pressed so 
often upon the young man who keeps his faith in the 
Bible, as to why such prominence is given to the He- 
brew history. God selected the best instrument for his 
purpose. The plan of revealing himself through men 
once chosen, this was the race foremost in moral capa- 
city ; the nation who not only, by inheriting the tradi- 
tions of the best ancestry, but by their natural consti- 
tution of mind, were best fitted to do his work in this 
thing. 

And there was also to be a distinct moral lesson in 
the development of the Hebrew nation. Born in the 
wilderness, the nation had a unique training for their 
mission. Nothing like it before or since in human his- 
tory. The escaped tribes go out of Egypt under cir- 
cumstances without a parallel, and for a journey that 
was as singular as was their mission peculiar. Why 
that long journey of forty weary years ? Some will 
hasten to say that it was for the sins of the people. 
But then the sins usually named as the reason for this 
journey were not committed until after the journey had 
begun, and there were indications at the outset that the 
journey was to be long, tedious and difficult. The 
course taken at the very commencement led them away 
from Palestine. The Land of Promise was but a little 
distance, had they gone in the direct way. There were 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 173 

fewer obstacles. They would have met no foes. Most 
of the brief journey would have been through a region 
of country desolate enough now, but then watered by 
" the river of Egypt," and connected by a grand system 
of canals with the Mediterranean. Had they taken this 
the natural and direct course, forty days, instead of 
forty years, would have sufficed for the journey. But 
they go away south-east towards the desert, rather than 
up north-east towards the fruitful plains of Southern 
Palestine. 

There is a reason for this thing. May it not be 
found in the teaching God would give that people ? He 
would leave such a stamp upon that race by his com- 
munications to them in this wilderness, that all through 
human history they should be "a peculiar people." 
Such laws he would impose upon them that no contact 
with any other race should ever entirely obliterate the 
impression. Left in Egypt, this teaching could not have 
been given. No more could it, had they gone at once into 
Palestine. They must be separated from heathen nations 
for a time. They must be under direct tuition. On the 
one hand, they must be purged from the defilement of 
Egyptian ideas, on the other, special revelations must b3 
given, and special discipline be received. The wilderness 
was their university, and God was their teacher. They 
were to cease to be tribes and become a nation. It was 
their period of childhood, — the period when what is 
learned abides ; when a single year tells on a life-time. 



J 74 A TOUtfG man's difficulties with his bible. 

The most magnificent ritual the world ever saw was 
introduced, every rite of which was eloquent with the 
truths of the coming Gospel. New ideas as to God, 
his holiness, his justice and his mercy, were put before 
this people. Every minutest thing, even down to the 
fringe on a priest's garment, was significant, while the 
grand feasts and festivals, the appointed sacrifices, the 
more marked celebrations of the nation were intended 
to make them acquainted with ideas to which all other 
Oriental nations were utter strangers. Nor by laws 
alone, but by providences often miraculous, did God 
give them teaching. But the providences would have 
been of little worth for this end aside from the laws. 
Ordinary and extraordinary observances, days of atone- 
ment and of passover and years of Jubilee, all were to 
make them familiar with the root-ideas of the Gospel 
time. It was designed to indoctrinate a people in reli- 
gion as never before. They were to be directly trained 
of God with no contamination from any surrounding 
nation. Taught of heaven, apart from all that could 
hinder the force of that teaching, and under the most 
favorable circumstances for that end that can be ima- 
gined, they spent those years in the wilderness. 

And this teaching was not alone for the Hebrew 
nation. It was the human race that was in the eye of 
God. The tuition of the wilderness was to be written 
out. It was to be a story for the world's study. And 
so it has been. For Mahometan and Jew and Christian 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 175 

alike have pondered it. Thousands who know nothing 
of general history, know of the wilderness wandering. 
Thousands who could not give a connected story of the 
battles of their own land, can tell of the battle fields 
and camping stations of the Hebrew host on the way 
from Egypt to Canaan. And when any young man 
is pressed with the objection that "too much space 
is occupied in the Bible by the story of an old race 
which has now lost its importance in human history," 
let him be ready to reply that such an objection shows 
not only narrowness of view but an entire mistake as to 
God's plan of using that Hebrew race in their historical 
development as the medium of his revelation to mankind. 
Seen in its true relation, seen as an intentional lesson- 
paper for the world, the old story of that peculiar 
nationality is not a Hebrew idyl, nor a scrap of anti- 
quity to be preserved by those curious and careful about 
the olden time. It is for us as well as for them ; a thing 
of to-day in meaning though of yesterday in fact. Its 
minuteness is not trivial, but intentionally careful. Its 
incidents are not accidents, but they are put into the 
record to be pondered, as they have actually been, by 
the most thoughtful and advanced souls of the race in 
their search after God's will. 

Nor, again, can we overlook the geographical posi- 
tion of this Hebrew race. The land of Canaan stood 
out fronting other lands. It was a part of Asia, and yet 
was separated from it by a distinct geological formation 



L76 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

that is without a parallel on the globe. In some con- 
vulsion of the crust of the earth, there has been formed 
a depression running north and south, so that the great 
Jordan valley lies a thousand feet, in some places, below 
the Mediterranean ; thus cutting off Palestine from its 
own continent and thrusting it forth into the presence 
of the world. Along its eastern shore stretched the 
"great and wide sea," the Mediterranean, with its 
Joppa the oldest, and its Tyre the grandest sea-port of 
the ancient civilization. Waves that washed Europe on 
the one side and Africa on the other came dashing in 
upon the long sea-beaches of Palestine. It was central 
to the commerce of the world. It invited the ships of 
every clime to bring their treasures for exchange upon 
those fruitful shores. That grand old sea gives us the 
means of making accurate the division between ancient 
and modern history. For if modern history is the his- 
tory of lands washed by the hoarse surges of the stormy 
Atlantic, then we may define ancient history as the 
history of the lands washed by the white surges of the 
blue and beautiful Mediterranean. But if Palestine 
stood fronting the sea and inviting its commerce, no 
less was the situation propitious on the landward view. 
If ships brought commerce over the sun-lit waves of the 
Mediterranean to her western coasts, the caravan, rich 
in treasures, on its way from Arabia and the lands of 
the more distant Orient, must pass through her eastern 
gates, and over the Jordan valley and up and into 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 177 

Palestine, on its way to the wealthy cities of Smyrna and 
Ephesus, in Asia Minor. 

So, too, on the south lay Egypt, the most fertile 
land on earth ; and north lay Assyria and Babylonia, 
prodigal of gold and gems, boasting of mineral as Egypt 
of agricultural wealth. In the rivalries of trade or the 
fiercer rivalries of war, this land of Palestine was directly 
on the highway between the two. None could pass 
east of it, for there was the pathless desert. They must 
go directly through for trade. They must march their 
armies directly across the plains in time of war. In 
days of peace — and Solomon saw that " the empire was 
peace," — the heaviest tolls might be exacted and were 
gladly paid. Hence the immense revenues of Solomon. 
Hence the riches that built the Jerusalem temple. In 
time of war — and this was nearly all the time — between 
the vast northern power and the vast southern kingdom, 
it was policy in the Jewish nation to take part with 
neither, but to furnish, at a regular commercial price, 
supplies to both. So that in a strict neutrality in war, 
and in a careful trade with the contestants, the advan- 
tages to them were nearly as great as those of peace. 
The great cities were back upon the spine of hills which 
runs up and down the land. And the Egyptian armies 
seeking their Assyrian foe, or the Assyrian hosts seeking 
their hereditary enemy of Egypt, always attempted to 
pass at the foot of these hills and between them and the 
sea. There were two plains along the sea-shore, vary- 

M 



118 A YOUNG MAN'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE. 

ing from one to twenty-five miles in width and thrice 
that length from north to south. Both of them led 
into a vast valley-plain of twenty by thirty miles running 
directly across the country from east to west, the great 
plain of Esdraelon, the battle-field of the world. On 
this field armies of every ancient and of nearly every 
modern nation have met in deadly conflict. It has been 
trod by Babylonian armies under Nebuchadnezzar, by 
Assyrian armies under Sennacherib, by Jewish armies 
under Gideon and Saul, by Egyptian hosts under Necho, 
by Moslem hordes under Saladin, by crusaders from 
Spain and Portugal, from Germany and Italy, by Eng- 
lish troops under Smith, and, less than a hundred years 
ago, by Frenchmen carrying the imperial eagles under 
the personal leadership of Napoleon I. of France. The 
world's history has been written in blood on this plain 
of Esdraelon, in Palestine. Those great conquerors 
whose disastrous fame has filled up with sickening full- 
ness the records of human history, have all seen that 
Palestine was geographically the pivot of empire, and 
that the Esdraelon plain was the great field the winning 
or the losing of which carried with it all they hoped or 
all they feared. To this plain they have come either in 
person* or by their armies. Here came the Persian 
Cyrus, the man whose rise to power is the most wonder- 
ful exploit in history ; that Nebuchadnezzar who when 
he died left behind him "* more buildings reared by his 
hands than any man who ever stood on this planet ; " 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 179 

that Macedonian conqueror who wept for other worlds 
to subdue ; that Roman Caesar who by his vast hordes 
overrun Palestine, giving imperial names to her cities 
and to her beautiful inland sea ; that Richard of Eng- 
land whose fame is world-wide ; that Godfrey, at once 
the pride of Europe and the boast of his own France ; 
that great emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose ashes are 
buried in the ruins of the old Christian temple at Tyre, 
near by this plain where he fought so nobly ; — these are 
some of the men who have seen in Palestine the very 
central spot of geographical position, the possession of 
which in their day was essential to their plans of empire. 
And when any young man hears a sneer thrown at 
Palestine as if it were never of any importance, as if it 
had always been an out-of-the-way land, and had no 
right to such an eminence in the Bible, let him recall 
the fact that it has been coveted more than the gold 
of Ophir and the mines of G-olconda by the great con- 
querors, statesmen, rulers of the world. And instead of 
heeding the sneer, let him pity the man whose knowl- 
edge of the history of the human race leads him to 
undervalue the importance of the land which geographi- 
cally was the most important land of any on earth to 
the older nations. Let him recall also the fact that when 
the older nations faded out and their lands were occu- 
pied by newer peoples, there was still the same ambition 
to possess Palestine. Assyria and Egypt, broken and 
retired from the stage, there arose west of Palestine, 



180 A YOUNG HAN'S difficulties with his bible. 

two empires, one that of Greece, the other that oi 
Rome. Both coveted the east, the far east. Between 
them and that far east stood Palestine. It was neces- 
sary to their project of universal empire to gain a foot- 
hold in Palestine and make it their base of operations. 
They came, a vast host, marching across Asia Minor, 
and whitening the Mediterranean with their vast fleets 
of transports. They effected a landing in Palestine. 
But -when they attempted to advance inward, they were 
met by the hosts of the far east who swarmed in upon 
the plain of Esdraelon from over the Jordan and gave 
them battle. In a hundred fights the Greek and the 
Roman had a sort of success. They occupied, partially, 
and for a very brief time, the country, holding it in 
military duress. But in the end both were routed, and 
retired discomfited from the land. They had dashed 
against this rock and their dreams of universal empire 
were rudely broken. And then, too, when other cen- 
turies had come and gone, and the Holy Land was the 
possession of the Moslem of the east, there went forth a 
cry through the west of lamentation because the cres- 
cent instead of the cross held Jerusalem. The cry of 
lamentation became one of angry warfare, and the cru- 
sades were organized. It was the whole west warring 
against the whole east. It was a continent rising against 
a continent for the possession of a strip of land not 
larger than the State of New Hampshire, but which had 
been for long centuries not only the best known but 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTOKIC FACTS. 181 

also the most coveted land on earth. The last blow 
ever struck by the crusaders was vainly given on a little 
eminence of the Esdraelon plain, a few hundred feet only 
from the spot where Jesus uttered the " Sermon on the 
Mount." And from that hour the victory of the east 
has been secured, and the Moslem has held Palestine in 
his merciless grasp. And as with religious wars so with 
those prompted purely by ambition. Napoleon in the 
fullness of his lust for power craved the mastery of the 
east. He saw the worth of Palestine as the only possible 
base for further conquests. And he must try his hand 
at the task only to find his dream of eastern empire 
melt away on these shores where others before him had 
met a similar fate. 

And thus God's choice of Palestine as a home for 
his people, as a place second to none in all the old world 
in its geographical importance, has been endorsed by 
the world's statesmen and warriors. It was no secluded 
spot. It fronted the continents. It took the eye of the 
world. All done there was done for the gaze of the 
race. And God's wisdom selected not only the people 
so keenly receptive of moral ideas, but the land for 
them to inhabit, that his purpose might be accomplished 
of giving to the race through them, as they dwelt in 
this central position, a revelation of his will. 

The historic position of the Hebrew race in their 
home at Palestine is worthy of study as showing another 
feature of God's plan. There were centuries before 



182 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

them. There have been centuries after them. But had 
they appeared sooner or later in the calendar of historic 
time, they would have utterly failed in their mission. 
Back of them were the two great historic peoples of 
Babylonia and Egypt, but both were waning when the 
Hebrews appeared. After them the Romans were the 
world's masters. Parallel with them was the Assyrian 
empire in the days of its strength. A few centuries 
earlier the documents of Moses would have been im- 
possible. A few centuries later the necessary tuition of 
the Hebrews in the arts of Egypt, could not have been 
had. Their geographical position was not more striking 
as they fronted the continents than was their historical 
position as they stood conspicuous in the world's thought. 
They took from the wisdom of Egypt all that was valu- 
able, just as Plato took his philosophy from the old city 
of On near the banks of the Nile. But Plato and the 
Greeks developed what they took in one way, and Moses 
and the Hebrew hosts in another. From Egypt came 
ideas of agriculture and the arts of embroidery and of 
letters for writing ; the knowledge of the astronomy by 
which the Hebrews fixed their numerous festivals, and 
the history by which Egypt became the second as Pales- 
tine the first of the Sacred Lands. And they left behind 
them in Egypt a moral impression, which was, in part 
at least, a revival of the more ancient Egyptian faith in 
the eternity of God and the immortality of man. From 
Pharaoh's reluctant lips they forced a confession of par- 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 183 

tial faith in Jehovah as God. When settled in Pales- 
tine their distinct belief was known to all the nations, 
and obtained respectful recognition. Hiram, king of 
Tyre, a hundred miles from Jerusalem, sent workmen 
to Solomon to assist in building the Temple on Moriah 
Cyrus gaye a decree which shows that Hebrew ideas had 
penetrated the Persian mind, and that the enslaved 
race were masters in the realm of ideas of their captors. 
And so, in war and in peace, in victory and in captiv- 
ity, now by voluntary and now again by involuntary teach- 
ing, the Hebrew ideas were slowly but surely working 
their way among the nations, and thus carrying for- 
ward the divine plan. And as God was ordering their 
historic position, so he was arranging the nations to 
receive the influence they were to exert. Parallel with 
them, during an important part of their history, was the 
Medo-Persian power under which flourished those sects 
nearest in religious belief to the Hebrews of any known 
to history. One of them, the world-famed " Magi," 
sent its deputation to Palestine at the birth of Christ. 
And when Jewish history culminated in the advent 
of Jesus, God had ready the one great empire of Eome, 
then the mistress of the world. Thus it was that the 
unity of peoples in one sovereignty made them, willing or 
unwilling, God's messengers to spread speedily the story 
of the cross over the inhabited earth. 

And here, too, we find the reason for those peculiar 
incidents which appear in the Scriptures. These inci- 



184 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

dents are intended to be object-lessons. Mere words 
would be forgotten. But facts with a moral meaning 
in tbem would be remembered. We cannot imagine 
any better way, or, indeed, any other way, in which God 
could teach the primitive tribes and nations. A fact, 
a striking occurrence, a phenomenon singularly unlike 
any other, which these olden nations would at once 
connect with the finger of God, was surely the most im- 
pressive, most natural form of moral teaching and the 
one most to be expected. If Hebrew history were with- 
out its examples of striking incidents used as divine 
object-lessons, we should have wondered at it. Their 
absence would try our faith more than their presence. 
To a people apt in receiving this kind of teaching, God 
gave these object-lessons ; — and the fact that they were 
accepted so readily, confirms our faith in the wisdom 
that selected the method. 

Take the story of the first man's first sin. The whole 
series of circumstances, seem to be contrived for their 
moral impression. No need, so far as man's actual fall 
was concerned, of the events which took place in the 
garden, of the serpent's agency, of the sword at the gate. 
But the occurrences were to be for the world's teaching. 
The garden not only does symbolize, but was intended, 
as we know by Christ's use of the word Paradise, to 
symbolize the state of happy holiness, the fullness of 
which is heaven. And sin was to be made loathsome 
and foul ; and temptation to be seen as stealthy and 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 185 

mean, a crouching serpent with slimy tongue and in- 
sinuating motion and beautiful form, to charm and then 
destroy men. And the historic fact of Satan's tempta- 
tion through words that seemed not his own but the 
serpent's words, is not only named by our Lord long 
centuries afterward, but the moral teaching of it is en- 
forced by him when he says, "Ye are of your father the 
Devil. He-was a liar from the beginning." The whole 
series of facts was to be rehearsed in the earliest 
centuries by the patriarchs and thus handed down 
through the generations, until written language came to 
the rescue of an oral tradition, and Moses must put the 
story on the imperishable pages of Eevelation. 

And the flood is in the same line of object-teaching. 
It taught the world of the sin of attempting to do with- 
out God. And no less was the deliverance given to 
Noah a designed instance of palpable teaching. For it 
has so stamped our whole mode of thought that, in the 
religious language of the world, the ark is the symbol of 
salvation. So, too, we can understand the overthrow of 
Sodom only when we see it as God's teaching of retri- 
bution. In the pathway of the great caravans, on the 
world's broadest highway, situated where its destruction 
would be as conspicuous as its wickedness had been 
notorious, sure to be the theme of remark as an example 
of divine wrath in its singular overthrow, in its doom 
first by fire and next by burial in the sea the mists of 
which are a perpetual reminder of the "smoke of hei 



186 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

torment," that old city, living in story though long 
dead in fact, has stood out on the sacred page as a 
solemn warning, the lurid light of which has caught the 
eye and alarmed the wickedness of all generations of 
men. And, in after ages the deserved destruction of 
the wicked Canaanites who were usurpers in Palestine, 
who had abundant opportunity to repent and to leave 
the land, but who made the approach of the Israelites a 
pretext for a war in direct defence of idolatry — this de- 
struction, so often condemned, is to be seen in the same 
light. It is no isolated event to be judged by ordinary 
rules. The nations that then existed and that were to 
be born needed to understand that denying God and 
attempting to thwart his will was sure to bring ruin. 
And so, all through the prophets, we hear those iron 
tongued men ring out the threat that as God destroyed 
the nations in Canaan so he would destroy the Jews, if 
they walked not in his ways. ' 

But probably, the incident in the Bible which the 
young man will hear most earnestly denounced is that 

1 As to Psalms which contain prayers for the destruction of 
David's enemies, it must be remembered that he was not a 
private man wishing for private vengeance, but a king, and as 
such the rightful head of authority and the executive whose 
duty it was to punish evil doers. And, above all, he was, before 
the surrounding nations, the representative of the Jehovah wor- 
ship. Hence the enmity of idolatrous princes was directed not 
only against his throne, but against his God and his religion. 
See the fifty-eighth Psalm, where we have in the eleventh verse 
an explanation of the malediction in the tenth verse. 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 187 

concerning the proposed sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. 
Though the act was not done, and was not intended to 
be done, yet there stands the command. The objector 
urges that such a command, though God intended at 
the last moment to stay the fatal knife, must have 
been an outrage on the moral sense of Abraham and of 
the whole world ; that it seems a blur upon the moral 
character of God himself for him to order the death of 
a child at a father's hands. It is true that the popular 
answer vindicates God from blame. It is true that we 
are to look at the " whole transaction, the command and 
the counter- command ; and that Abraham afterwards 
saw the scope and compass of it which cleared up every 
difficulty." l But is it enough that we simply clear God 
and his servant Abraham from blame ? This would 
leave the matter in its negative aspect. It would per- 
haps excuse, but would it justify the transaction ? Nor 
does it tell us the deep reason for this command, so 
unusual ; nor does it give us any hint as to why the story 
is so prominently recorded in God's Word. There must 
have been some great reason, lying back of all this, for 
allowing such a transaction as the attempted offering of 
a son in human sacrifice by the hand of a father who 
was the most righteous of all the men in his day. 

Now what if we have here God's object-lesson in 
redemption — the "preaching of the Gospel." What if 
the full justification of the transaction, not only to the 

1 " Moral Difficulties of the Bible." — Hessey. 



188 A YOUNG man's difficulties with his bible. 

Patriarch's moral sense but to that of the whole world, 
is to be found in that which it was intended to teach 
men of God's love in its method of saving them, by the 
sacrifice of the only-begotten Son. Put it thus : There 
had come to Adam, in the garden, the primal promise, 
hard after the primal sin. It was no general declaration 
of a redemption, but tbe special promise of a Eedeemer. 
This promised Eedeemer was the one object of all the 
ancient faith. The belief in his coming was the one 
article in the creed of the "youthful world's grey 
fathers." Further on in history, the mass of the race 
had lost out the belief in the promise, and so were 
doing "only evil." God sent Noah, who, in the very 
form of deliverance granted his household, preached the 
Gospel in a figure — the ark being not only a type of 
salvation, but of its method by special Divine interfer- 
ence for those who believe and obey. Years go by. 
The faith in the promise is again almost lost. There 
is needed once more — this time for all the centuries — a 
great palpable object-lesson that shall stand up and out 
ind take the eye of the world. But who should give 
this lesson if not this man Abraham, " the father of the 
faithful ? " He was to set the world a lesson of human 
faith in obeying a divine command. Why not also a 
lesson as to the Divine Fatherhood, as it was to show 
itself in making sacrifice for human redemption ? Can 
any other way be imagined so awful, so tender, so im- 
pressive as that of a father giving up his only son f 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 189 

Now, what if God, the atoning idea ever present in his 
thought and ever craving expression, took this man 
Abraham as it were at his word. "What if he appoints 
to him such a lofty proclamation of this fact as was 
allotted to no other "preacher of righteousness." 
Abraham shall, in a sense, represent God. He shall 
show what God's love is like. He shall help prepare 
the world for the Calvary scene. Through this father's 
devotion of his son to death and through his receiving 
of Isaac "from the dead, from whence he received him 
in a figure," there was set forth, as nearly as could be 
done by any human transaction, the great fact of God's 
gift of the Divine Son to die and to rise from the grave 
for human redemption. And so this whole scene is to 
be judged not at all by our ordinary rules of moral 
judgment as to right and wrong. And if we fail to see 
how as a merely human transaction we can quite justify 
it, we are happily delivered from all difficulty when we 
see in it a divinely-ordained setting forth of the great 
redemptive fact. That it has been looked upon gener- 
ally through the Christian centuries as our greatest illus- 
tration of that fact, is no small evidence that it was in- 
tended so to be regarded by God. And thus it was a 
prophetic scene ; a great objective representation to 
those who lived before the Messiah's day. Only thus 
can we understand this transaction, or justify it, or 
admire it. The Messianic idea is the key to many an 
event in the Old Testament. And nowhere do we more 



190 



need it, and nowhere, when seen, is it more instructive 
than in this great object-lesson of redemption which is 
here furnished to the world. 

And a young man's difficulties are removed and his 
faith is established by noticing what may be called the 
timing of the miracles and " wonderful works " of the 
Scriptures. This thing grows on one who studies the 
volume. The miracles are no longer a confused jumble 
of strange events. Each takes its place ; its own place ; 
and it is seen that it could not have come in at any other 
time. No two of these miracles can change places. 
The flood does its work at its own epoch. Abraham's 
attempted sacrifice is the event for that hour, and for 
no other. No Old Testament miracle could have oc- 
curred in New Testament times. Those that appear 
somewhat alike are so only in appearance. The New 
Testament miracles are exactly ordered as to the point 
where they occurred. They are progressive. The 
" raising of Lazarus," could not change places with the 
" turning of the water into wine," except by an entire 
destruction not only of the Gospel story but also of the 
harmony of Christ's own character. He could not, being 
the Christ he is, have inverted this order, if he would 
be understood by men. Embosomed in a family known 
only in the social circles of a Galilean province, it was 
exactly fit that his first miracle should be the consecra- 
tion of domestic life. But the grand resurrection 
miracle was best done near Jerusalem, just when all 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 191 

teaching and all miracle were culminating at the close 
of his ministry. 

And this element of time is to be noticed in an 
event mid-way between the two just named — the trans 
figuration. It grew out of a want that did not exist 
either at the outset or at the close of Christ's earthly life. 
It was needed alike by the state of mind in which the 
immediate disciples found themselves, and of the scheme 
of his own life as shown by what preceded and followed 
the event. He had just told them of his coming death. 
It surprised them more than all his miracles. Eight 
long weary days they pondered the strange fact so un- 
likely if he were really "the Christ." He told them 
that they might also have to lay down their own lives. 
They think of him as failing, of his mission as ending in 
defeat and of their own utter loss as those embarked in 
a ruined cause. Never was their faith so low. In this 
condition they fail utterly to do the mighty works they 
had performed so easily a month before. He takes a 
part of them up Tabor ; or, it may be, a spur of Her- 
mon. They are weak in faith in him as "the one 
sent of God." But in the Tabor manifestation they see 
at once who Christ is! The heavenly glory is about 
him. They can doubt no more. The conversation of 
the denizens of the other world is about that death 
which these disciples thought so shameful, but which 
now is so gl orious. Their faith needed a palpable object- 
lesson. Tabor gives it. They accept his death, per- 



192 A young man's difficulties with his bible. 

haps also their own, as an event connected with the 
eternal glory. And how much the transfiguration 
meant to the world at large as the completion of its 
idea of Christ ! He had shown his power over nature, 
in stilling the tempest, in feeding the hungry thousands ; 
over man's body by healing his diseases, by giving sight 
to the blind and tongues to the dumb ; over man's soul 
by forgiving sins ; over the lower world of evil spirits 
by casting out demons from those who had been allowed 
to receive that peculiar visitation. But there remained 
one other department in which there was need that he 
should show his sovereignty. Had he power over the 
world of holy souls ? Was heaven also allegiant to him ? 
Would it acknowledge him ? Would those who do God's 
will in the highest places of the universe, the most select 
spirits, come at his bidding as demons had gone at his 
command ? See ! The heavens open. Moses the 
greatest of lawgivers, and Elias the greatest of prophets, 
who for centuries had been serving in heaven, came at 
his word! When works are done that show power over 
nature the world thinks, though incorrectly, of physical 
might. When works are done that show power over the 
world of evil souls, men can say that Satan has them 
in allegiance. But none save God himself can com- 
mand the allegiance of the holy, and have them obey. 
More striking was the Bethany miracle. More impres- 
sive to the general sense of the world was the resurrec- 
tion of our Lord himself. But no event of all his event- 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 193 

f ul life so exhibits his power, his majesty, his glory, as 
does this obedience of the souls so long disembodied, so 
long serving in the interior service of heaven ; the souls 
standing nearest the Great White Throne. 

And it will help a young man's faith if he will see 
the setting of these miracles and these wonders in their 
moral teaching. In the miracles of Jesus this is very 
evident. The feeding of the five thousand grew out of 
three things which occurred together at that very point. 
There was, first, the multitude physically hungry. Or- 
dinarily they could have gone to the city and bought 
bread. So too, they were hungry for truth. One of 
those movements, inexplicable except by the theory that 
God's spirit sometimes moves peculiarly on men's souls, 
was in progress. Truth had impressed, but not yet done 
its whole work in conversion. Should the process be 
stopped in the soul for want of a few loaves ? So, too, 
there was a lingering doubt about him in their minds. 
He meets at once the physical, the intellectual and the 
moral want of these men. 

And, more, he is shown to the world, when the event 
goes upon the Gospel page, as the master of nature, 
able to perfect in an instant its processes ; and at the 
same time, while so great, he is also shown as caring for 
man's "daily bread." And yet the fitness of miracle to 
teaching, and of them both to the idea of Christ which 
the world was to receive is not more striking in this 
than in the case of every miracle of the Bible. 

N 



194 A TOTING MA^'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BLBLE. 

And the miracles, especially of Jesus, are not merely 
accompanied with teaching, but they have a meaning in 
themselves. They are not separate wonders but orderly 
facts in the development of Christ's doctrine. Hence 
their prominence. They stand right out. They strike 
the eye. They are not only signs and evidences of 
Christ's authority, but divine object-lessons, to which 
our Lord appeals. He told men that, if they were 
doubtful about his words, there were his works. If 
they did not understand the one they could the other. 
He did not look upon his miracles as merely physical 
facts. They had moral relations. And so too the 
Apostles regarded them. The resurrection of their 
Master was the great miracle — so great that, if true, 
there could be no objection to the other and lesser mir- 
acles which they proclaimed every where. It is to them 
no pretty fable, no beautiful myth. In their way of 
telling it, it was a fact with a moral meaning. It carried 
with itself the whole moral system of Christian facts and 
doctrines. And when the lesson of each miracle is seen 
it is no excrescence to the growth of the fair tree of rev- 
elation. Its teaching is the most miraculous thing 
about any miracle. No miracle was simply a "sign " in 
the physical world. It was chiefly a " wonder " in the 
moral realm. The miracles carried with them an elo- 
quence most convincing. Their light went out through 
all the earth and their words to the end of the world. 
There is no speech nor language where their voice is 



DIFFICULTIES ABOUT HISTORIC FACTS. 195 

not heard. They are stars in the moral heavens that 
declare the glory of God and show his handy-work. 

The miracles have not only moral ends, but they are 
themselves teachings. There is the marrow of some 
Gospel doctrine in every miracle of Jesus. A miracle 
is a doctrine incarnate. And the old-time miracles, in 
the destruction of Sodom, in the crossing of the Red 
Sea, in the healing by a look at the lifted serpent, in 
the descending manna, in the divided Jordan, in the 
thro wn-d own walls of Jericho, — what are these but 
God's great object-teachings, even if no word be uttered 
in explanation ? 

And only as one sees the grand setting of these mir- 
acles, their place, time, order, purpose, in God's great 
unfolding of his redemptive plan, do these things that, 
all alone, to the merely philosophic or scientific eye, 
appear like blemishes, become beauties ; these hindran- 
ces helps ; these difficulties of faith its best arguments 
and supports. The key-stone of the arch standing alone 
would be an impossibility. But then it does not stand 
alone. It is to be seen in its place with other stones. 
And in the temple of God's revealed will these miracles 
are no hindrance to the use, and no excrescence upon 
the beauty of the structure, when one shall rightly come 
to see and to hear and to worship with reverent heart. 
They have their place. There would be here a weak- 
ened arch and there an unfilled niche without them. 
"Not one can be spared. There is no blemish as of a 



196 A YOUNG MAX'S DIFFICULTIES WITH HIS BIBLE 

single useless thing. Nothing can he added, without 
harm, nothing taken away without loss. Each thing 
was in the plan of the structure as drawn by the archi- 
tect. And the architect and the builder were one. So 
that each thing adds in its own way to the strength or 
to the beauty of the edifice which God has reared. It is 
a structure the foundation of which is his truth, and its 
top-stone his praise. 



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